Native American Tribe Can't Be a 'Sovereign' Shield During Patent Review, Says Court (arstechnica.com) 150
Cyrus Farivar writes via Ars Technica: In a unanimous decision, an appellate court has resoundingly rejected the legal claim that sovereign immunity, as argued by a Native American tribe, can act as a shield for a patent review process. On July 20, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found in a 3-0 decision that the inter partes review (IPR) process (a process that allows anyone to challenge a patent's validity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office) is closer to an "agency enforcement action" -- like a complaint brought by the FTC or the FCC -- than a regular lawsuit.
This case really began in September 2015. That was when Allergan, a pharma company, sued rival Mylan, claiming that Mylan's generics infringed on Allergan's dry eye treatment known as Restasis. Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe was initially filed in the Eastern District of Texas, known as a judicial region that is particularly friendly to entities that are often dubbed patent trolls. By 2016, Mylan initiated the IPR. But Allergan, in an attempt to stave it off, struck a strange deal, transferring ownership of the six Restasis-related patents to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, based in Upstate New York, near the Canadian border. As part of that deal, Allergan paid $13.75 million to the tribe, with a promise of $15 million in annual payments -- if the patents were upheld, that is. The Mohawk Tribe attempted to end the IPR, citing sovereign immunity, which was denied. The tribe struck at least one other similar deal with a firm known as SRC Labs, which sued Amazon and Microsoft.
This case really began in September 2015. That was when Allergan, a pharma company, sued rival Mylan, claiming that Mylan's generics infringed on Allergan's dry eye treatment known as Restasis. Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe was initially filed in the Eastern District of Texas, known as a judicial region that is particularly friendly to entities that are often dubbed patent trolls. By 2016, Mylan initiated the IPR. But Allergan, in an attempt to stave it off, struck a strange deal, transferring ownership of the six Restasis-related patents to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, based in Upstate New York, near the Canadian border. As part of that deal, Allergan paid $13.75 million to the tribe, with a promise of $15 million in annual payments -- if the patents were upheld, that is. The Mohawk Tribe attempted to end the IPR, citing sovereign immunity, which was denied. The tribe struck at least one other similar deal with a firm known as SRC Labs, which sued Amazon and Microsoft.
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Re: Stupid (Score:1)
It doesn't exist you fool.
Re: Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
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Who are you to tell some native group of people what they can and can't do?
Europeans showed up and straight up took it; that's who. Native Americans have been fucked over left, right and center since Columbus arrived. Sure, we told the that their reservations were sovereign territory. But when push comes to shove, the American system isn't going to let them actually assert that right. I mean, who's in charge here?
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Oh, please.
Before Europeans came along various tribes and nations of Native Americans were busy fighting each other over territory and resources just like their European cousins. Read up on the Aztecs. Many of the traditional areas ascribed to tribes are based on where they were when Europeans met them. Search back 100 years and you find that their distribution is different, based on migration, conquest and warfare. Being basically stone age civilizations they were simply less effective than their Iron and
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Why would they bother? When did they ever need to rationalize it, and to who?
Re: Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, we told the that their reservations were sovereign territory
That's just a convenient fiction to make everyone involved feel better. They have no monetary system, no independent economy, no military, no ability to maintain relations with other nations, and no control over their borders. The idea that they're "sovereign" in any meaningful sense of the word is absurd. At best they're a "sovereign state" in the same way that Texas or California are; able to pass and enforce laws within their own territory, but subject to most of the same federal regulations as any ot
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Sovereign in the sense that the US passed treaties saying so. While it's true that these treaties are not often upheld, the current state of the law in the US is that native American tribes enjoy an amount of sovereignty and autonomy on their reservations.
Re: Stupid (Score:2)
If the US passed treaties saying that PI is exactly 3, it still wouldn't make it so.
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In reality, the tribes do indeed have an amount of sovereignty and autonomy. I didn't say that it should be that way or not, just that this is the way it is in practice today in law.
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Re: Stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody was trying to get them to assimilate. They massacred them, then drove out the survivors to land nobody wanted. Then, when people wanted that land they drove them out again, sometimes forcing them to walk vast distances without adequate supplies - in massacres only slightly less destructive than the original ones.
Assimilation would have involved giving them legal property and civil rights that would be honored, rather than sovereign immunity via treaties which were universally discarded as soon as they became inconvenient to the U.S. business interests of the day.
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Did you reply to the right comment? You seem rather tangential. My entire point was that natives were routinely stripped of their acquired and inherited wealth, at gunpoint, and were never really granted any civil rights whatsoever until recently - only the temporary respecting of of tribal sovereignty until it became inconvenient to do so, at which point they were stripped of any rights at all.
In the long term they might have been better off being granted citizenshp - but nobody with any power had any int
Re: Stupid (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.history.com/news/h... [history.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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However the laws of the US override your theory. The constitution takes precedence over "might makes right", and so the treaties we make with the tribes have the force of law (assuming the US attempts to hold up the treaties).
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Actually, no. Identity politics and tribalism (quite literally) have no place in the US, and that's good thing.
Look around you. That is manifestly untrue. You may prefer it otherwise, but tribalism and identity politics are alive, well, and thoroughly embedded in American culture. They are as American as chanting, "USA! USA!"
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Neither do I. Sadly, what we do or do not condone has no impact on what does and doesn't have a place here. It is here. It has been here since the beginning, and been embraced by both the public and those with power pretty much the entire time. Some of us may wish to eliminate it, but to say it has no place here is to deny past and present reality.
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I was referring to the beginning of the U.S., arguably 1492 - humans haven't existed since any more fundamental beginning. But tribalism seems to have accompanied humanity from it's beginnings as as a technological species, and followed the early migrants to this continent, along with the several subsequent migrant waves, including the final (to date) European one.
Tribalism has been part of humanity, and part of the United States, since the beginning of each. You need only look at the ever-thriving anti-i
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How is that not what I just said? Try rereading the first sentence of the second paragraph. Everything else is about the U.S., because that's the country being discussed.
Work of fiction about sovereign immunity (Score:4, Informative)
If you're interested in the relation between native american tribes and misuse of sovereign immunity, I can recommend The Whistler by John Grisham, a nice read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Am I missing something? The book you are citing is a work of FICTION, correct? How can that be informative for this issue?
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Whaddya mean by "otherwise?" Conquerers fight for their land too.
We're all in the same boat on this: we all want maximum/unlimited resources, but we can't all have it. Fighting is nature's dispute resolution process. Unfortunately, nature is known for always coming up with the absolutely worst, cruellest solutions.
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And they should be grateful some of them still exist at all. They could have been simply made extinct.
Witness the American mindset. Truth and justice! It's the American way!
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Did you misspell Whiteness?
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Their casino isn't bad, as casinos go. Was only there on the off season, though.
But diversifying into taking money for no reason from patent trolls --- I'm all for it!
Shield (Score:2)
OK, and what is a 'shield' in this sense?
Profit motives (Score:4, Insightful)
the drug companies were trying to find a way to be exempt from law
And this surprises you somehow? Sounds like business as usual to me.
I find it appalling the length companies will go to undermine the rule of law.
It should be appalling. Yet we have an entire major political party which spends considerable energy towards eliminating regulations that prohibit companies from doing just that.
The US culture of profit at any cost and loss of morality is disheartening.
US culture is hardly alone in an over enthusiasm for profits and damn the consequences. And not everyone in the US is on board with profit at any cost. Just enough people to make it a real problem. That said, a profit motive is a useful thing, provided it is adequately constrained with rules to keep things reasonably fair and in the public interest. It's only a problem when we start pretending that free markets and profit motives will actually solve the problems caused by failed free markets and unchecked profit motives.
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And more importantly, US companies sue other companies in sovereign nations all the time. Just because it's located in an enclave of the US makes no difference.
Native American tribes are exempt from many laws. (Score:1)
Native American tribes are exempt from many laws. List of 511 "indian" gaming operations https://www.500nations.com/Indian_Casinos_List.asp
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It's actually one of the first links in the summary here [wikipedia.org]:
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Ignore the others... the issue here is that there are two places a defendant can challenge a patent, in federal court or in the Patent Office. In theory, the two tribunals should follow the same standard, but in practice, the Patent Office is far more willing to invalidate patents. As a result, both sides will spend big money fighting about which of the two tribunals will decide the case.
The specific 'shield' is here actually the 11th amendment (which states and tribes can't be sued in Federal court) + ru
summary is incomprehensible (Score:1)
> Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe was initially filed in the Eastern District of Texas
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
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Court cases are often named by "X vs. Y" where X is the name of the plaintiff and Y the name of the defendant. In this case, it was shortened to solely "X" which is "Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe" in this case.
And yes, usually the quotation marks are omitted. See, for example, the article in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A clear as mud ... (Score:4, Informative)
The summary is about as clear as mud, and the underlying story seems to be deliberate obfuscation
Re: A clear as mud ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I understood is that a pharmaceutical company has some bogus patents and in order to avoid having them voided transferred them to a native American tribe so they can claim so ereign immunity.
Which doesn't make any sense at all to me, a US patent is itself valid or not, how can it matter who it belongs to. So if I understood correctly the decision seems right and rather obvious. Then again you never know with the judicial system...
Re: A clear as mud ... (Score:4)
Re: A clear as mud ... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is not, if a patent is valid or not. The problem is how to determine if a patent is valid or not. If someone can claim souvereignity, the processual possibilities to invalidate a patent in his ownership are limited. Basicly he can say: Don't touch it, it's mine! And because the USPTO once agreed to the claims and issued the patent, it is valid as of now, and because of the don't-touch-it-doctrin, the state of validity can't be changed.
Silly question, but what would the case be if you replaced "native american" with any other citizenship that isn't US based?
For example say an Australian sent a patent filing to the USPTO, paid the fees, and the patent was initially granted without issue. Later the patent was challenged and the USPTO agreed it was not valid to be issued after all.
What happens?
It seems obvious the patent wouldn't be legally valid in the US, but what about Internationally?
Is the patent then only seen as invalid to the rest of the world due to a treaty, some equivalent of the berne convention of copyright but for patents instead?
Are sovereign native americans not a party to such a treaty?
I just don't understand why a native american tribe would be any different to any other countries citizen doing the same, or perhaps don't understand what you mean when you say "Don't touch it, it's mine" in this context.
Re: A clear as mud ... (Score:4, Informative)
It's more akin to if Australia owned a patent not an individual Australian. According to US law, a tribe has the same standing as a whole other country, hence the sovereign part of sovereign immunity.
It was sort a Hail Mary though by the pharmaceutical company, since state colleges fall under the same doctrine as they are legally part of the state government, and it's already been ruled that that isn't any sort of shield for reviewing the status of their patents. This just confirms that the same things applies to other countries and tribes as well as individual states.
Also, patents, copyrights, and trademarks are not recognized internationally anyway, you have to file in each jurisdiction. There are some exceptions like the EU countries, but buy and large they're jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
Re: A clear as mud ... (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is not, if a patent is valid or not. The problem is how to determine if a patent is valid or not. If someone can claim souvereignity, the processual possibilities to invalidate a patent in his ownership are limited. Basicly he can say: Don't touch it, it's mine! And because the USPTO once agreed to the claims and issued the patent, it is valid as of now, and because of the don't-touch-it-doctrin, the state of validity can't be changed.
Silly question, but what would the case be if you replaced "native american" with any other citizenship that isn't US based?
For example say an Australian sent a patent filing to the USPTO, paid the fees, and the patent was initially granted without issue. Later the patent was challenged and the USPTO agreed it was not valid to be issued after all.
What happens?
It seems obvious the patent wouldn't be legally valid in the US, but what about Internationally?
Is the patent then only seen as invalid to the rest of the world due to a treaty, some equivalent of the berne convention of copyright but for patents instead?
Not a silly question, but it has an easy answer: US patents are only good in the US. You have to get a patent in every country you want to enforce your rights in. Most entities only get patents in the big countries as a rules - US, China, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, etc., with some occasional ones in other countries like Canada, Australia, India, etc., usually depending if they have a large market or competitor there. Hardly anyone bothers getting a patent in, say, Ghana.
There is an international treaty called the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but it's more procedural - you file a PCT application, and it gets an examination by WIPO and is then transmitted to each national patent office... And then you pay fees only in the countries you want a patent in, and those countries usually do a further examination. It saves a bit of money if you're going into more than about 3-4 countries, but it doesn't provide any substantive rights.
Are sovereign native americans not a party to such a treaty?
I just don't understand why a native american tribe would be any different to any other countries citizen doing the same, or perhaps don't understand what you mean when you say "Don't touch it, it's mine" in this context.
It has to do with sovereign immunity [wikipedia.org]. Generally, you can't sue the US or a state unless there's a statute that gives you permission to do so (e.g. the Federal Tort Claims Act, etc.). The weird wrinkle with native americans is that the US has given them pseudo-sovereign status, so generally, you can't sue a tribe unless there's a statute that allows the suit.
So the tricksy part here is that the pharma company with the crap patent sold it to a tribe. One way to invalidate a patent is to initiate an Inter Partes Review before the Board of Patent Appeals at the USPTO, but that's kind of like "suing" the tribe, so they're immune, right?
Well, no. The Fed. Circ. threw that out in an entirely predictable decision.
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Go back to Europe/Asia/Africa. You're not real american.
Putin Russia troll caught with his pants down.
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>The problem is how to determine
It's not 'how,' it's 'who gets to determine.' That is, the fight is over whether validity will be decided by a Patent Office judge or Federal Court judge/jury.
>he processual possibilities to invalidate a patent in his ownership are limited.
It depends on what you mean by that... All defenses/procedures available in the PTO are also available in Federal Court, plus a bunch more. The defendant here just prefers the Patent Office because it thinks the PTO judge will be m
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And "injuns" have the exact same patent rights as everyone else. Not less, as the GP troll suggests, and not more, as the court ruling states.
Re: A clear as mud ... (Score:4)
Allergan was claiming the challenge to a patent was the same as a lawsuit and since the patents belonged to a sovereign entity which was immune to lawsuits it therefore couldn't be challenged. The court got this one right.
Re: great story (Score:3)
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You think patent law is something tech nerds in general aren't interested in? Are you new here?
Protecting the Native Way of Life ... (Score:2)
... which is ripping off rival pharmaceutical companies? Somehow that does not seem like a traditional lifestyle.
I am all for autonomous, but this seems more like a tax haven than autonomy to me.
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> which is ripping off rival pharmaceutical companies?
No, actually, as posted elsewhere here, most of this tribe's income comes from a casino which is legal because of its special legal status.
You can just think of this as the tribe letting these patent owners bet at a really high stakes table, the Federal court system.
(Yes, I realize that gambling income is also not your idea of "the Native Way of Life", but on the other hand, the "non-Native Way of Life" has mostly made "the Native Way of Life" a pract
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And if they only sold the patented medication inside of their reservation, there would be no reason for a lawsuit. If the pharmaceutical country transferred the ownership of the patent to Canada, another sovereign nation, they new owner would still be sued.
Re:Protecting the Native Way of Life ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of what they use their sovereign status for is skirting around gambling laws, but you do from time to time hear about suspect alliances like this where tribes help people get around various laws. Last example I heard of was one payday loan company, who operated in a different state, who used the claim of being associated with a tribe to skirt around loads of financial regulations. Thankfully the authorities saw right trough it and just dismantled the whole company. Even went as far as putting their executives in jail, thou one avoided jail by committing suicide, and having them forfeit most of their property.
The most shocking thing about that case was how dismissive the members of the tribe were to the distress of the people screwed over by the company, how they didn't see anything wrong with what the company did and how after the company's justified demise they were in the process of building up a similar enterprise themselves.
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The most shocking thing about that case was how dismissive the members of the tribe were to the distress of the people screwed over by the company,
That's shocking? They're still being screwed over by our government daily. Even putting aside the past, what is their motivation to care?
Aww, did I hurt your snowflake feelings, mod? (Score:2)
Natives* are targeted for abuse nationwide. Well, in the parts of the nation our government didn't genocide them the fuck out of, anyway. I may be a little bit biased because I've actually known natives, worked with them, hung out with them... biased towards treating them as humans, that is. And our government doesn't do that. It gives them a paltry amount of money, but it doesn't make up for anything. It's basically a payment to justify past, present, and future abuse.
* OK, no such thing really... Remember
Re: Aww, did I hurt your snowflake feelings, mod? (Score:2)
I may be a little bit biased because I've actually known natives, worked with them, hung out with them... biased towards treating them as humans, that is.
No, you're biased against western culture, which means that you can't pass up an opportunity to make up nonsense which paints it in a negative light.
Over in the world, Indians have the same rights and privileges as all other citizens, and often enjoy special privileges above and beyond those granted to everyone else. Whatever bullshit mistreatment you're imagining is entirely of your own making.
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The most shocking thing about that case was how dismissive the members of the tribe were to the distress of the people screwed over by the company,
That's shocking? They're still being screwed over by our government daily. Even putting aside the past, what is their motivation to care?
Modern Indians have all the rights and privileges of all US citizens, plus some additional ones if they live on a reservation.
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I've heard people claim they're being screwed by the government, but I honestly have't ever seen much evidence of this.
The ACLU has, and posts about it somewhat regularly.
and legal issues relating land use and ownership.
Yeah. They're supposed to be in charge of their own lands, right? But then cities make it impossible for them to do things like have events on it. For example, one of the local tribelets of Pomos wanted to host the Northern California Renaissance Faire in Nice, CA. But the rich old white cocks who have been crapping up Lake County, CA since time was time prevented it. Told them they couldn't do it because of traffic issues, etc etc. Meanwhile they have the
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I'm also kind of unconvinced of your blanket statements about the police in general being racist against all of them. Having seen what a really bad, and incidentally predominate
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The worst you could come up with was some people preventing them from hosting a big public event over traffic concerns?
That's not the worst thing in my comment, but it is telling as to how little sovreignty they actually have.
Considering the infrastructure, or rather lack thereof, on tribal land that I've seen that doesn't even sound particularly unreasonable as I imagine infrastructure outside of tribal land is probably a lot better.
The rancheria in question is one of the better-developed ones, and they have more infrastructure than does the prior, long-running home of the festival. So no, you have no idea what you're on about, and you're speaking from a position of prejudice. Typical racist shit.
I'm also kind of unconvinced of your blanket statements about the police in general being racist against all of them.
So? That's just you speaking from your position of prejudice again.
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There is a reason that Nice, CA is named after a city in France; it isn't part of a Native American reservation! That's why to hold an event there, you have to be able to comply with local land use rules.
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Um, no. That's not how it works at all.
The legal reasoning is that for a state like mine, during it's early history (frequently before statehood), the federal government obtained title to the land by entering into treaties with various existing nations. The treaties (to oversimplify) had the clauses that the nations would give up one section
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It's still kind of half-assed, though, because they're not full states. Natives vote in statewide elections, are represented in congress by the representatives of their states and so on.
I don't think there was ever any original intent to make them sovereign peers of the states. I think that result is a combination of bad faith treaties (offers made that were never expected to be delivered or enforced) and modern-era litigation enforcement of those treaties.
It boils down to natives getting what they were p
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You are probably correct, but AFAIK (and I'm not a lawyer), judges don't buy into the idea that a treaty is invalid because the US had no intent of honoring it.
Nor, I would argue, should the courts decide that the government gets an o
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No, I think the courts have done the right thing -- the treaties were signed with the terms they had, and they should be honored.
That being said, the policy outcomes aren't great. The concept of sovereignty is dubious beyond the states and it seems really muddled to start talking about a legal entity that is somehow parallel to state level sovereignty but without the clarity and legal force of constitutional statehood.
I think it's a surprising and short sighted deficit in the Constitution itself that the r
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Shhh! I like buying that Indian gasoline.
Re:Protecting the Native Way of Life ... (Score:4, Informative)
The is a deeper legal framework at play here. Certain, not all, Native American nations are legal entities in their own right. They have sovereignty under U.S. law, typically recognized under treaties that were signed between these nations and the United States Federal government.
In this way they are more or less equivalent to the States themselves in their legal rights. So the States are not "allowing" Native Americans the skirt state laws, the members of particular Nations are not subject to them, particularly on lands owned by the tribes which are technically not within the boundaries of the states, but are sovereign nations. That's what "sovereign" means, power not legally curtailed by a higher political entity. They are, however bound by such Federal laws as are either articulated by treaty or accepted by both political entities.
Hence the federal court's authority to say their sovereign does not apply in this case.
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It has nothing to do with repaying anything. It has to do with the rule of law and established treaties and established court decisions. You can't tear up a treaty and abolish reservation autonomy just because you'd like to. Well okay you can and the US did a lot of that to reduce the former treaties to the current forms, but doing so has chilling effects on the willingness of anyone else to trust your word in the future.
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Another often ignored point is that life in NA tribes usually isn't that great and that sovereign immunity is often used by the tribe to treat some of its members in ways that the US federal or state government wouldn't get away with in the same situation. Most NA tribe members would be better off if the tribes would no longer have any official status. As it stands, the current legal situation doesn't benefit tribe members, but the tribe and that usually means those few within the tribe that hold the most c
Poor people at each other's throats (Score:2)
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I have Native American friends so I've frequented reservations. They're like southern trailer parks but without the pizaz. We didn't just stick them on reservations, we stuck the reservations on the crummiest land in the country. When you're that dirt poor you're too busy trying to survive to worry about others. It's a classic technique of any ruling class: keep everyone on the verge of disaster so they won't band together to help each other out.
Well.... can they leave? Why shouldn't they if it sucks so bad?
Mylan, the scrooge of pharma companies (Score:1)
While I'm against tribes abusing their sovereignty to shield scammers and now patent trolls apparently, I'm also rooting for anyone who takes on Mylan. That's the company which charges 400x the cost of producing the EpiPen that's been in production for decades and prevents anyone from creating a generic alternative due to their strictly enforced patent.
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Its possible they are both evil, but every issue is unique. I'm not sure if their patent held merit, but abusing sovereign immunity to keep a patent is ridiculous.
And the winners/losers are... (Score:2)
I think it's pretty obvious what really happened here: The original patent holders were openly suckered by the tribes. Let's look briefly at the events preceding this point in the story:
Allergan had some patents which they were using in Eastern Texas to assert some potentially highly lucrative claims. The winds turned, patent protections were weakened nationwide, and it became clear that their patents were about to be invalidated. They paid millions to a tribe to "shelter" those patents behind their soverei
How about: Sovereign? No patents for you. (Score:2)
Or rather: The transfer ought to automatically invalidate the patents. You can have all the patents covering the jurisdiction of your own little piece of reservation land, but the US does not allow other countries or sovereign entities to grant themselves patent rights over American persons on American soil.
I could never follow the logic of this (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the various bands were promised, by treaty (the highest law in the land as I understand it) and by later court verdicts, that they would be sovereign on their own land. But this has always been an empty promise. Any time it turned out they were sitting on land that turned out to be valuable, it just got taken away. Despite being sovereign nations in their own right, their young men were (and still are) subject to the draft. Despite being sovereign, federal law enforcement agencies have had a piss poor track record of respecting that and engaging in proper cooperation with any reservation police. In short, America (and Canada) have only allowed the native peoples a limited form of autonomy NOT sovereignty and always ignored even that when convenient.
With that kind of track record in place, I don't see how the St Regis Mohawk ever thought it might work. Mind you, that first 13.75 million was certainly welcome.
There's another angle by which this would have failed as well. Lets suppose, for the sake of argument, that the sovereign claims were upheld (ignoring the fact that questions of sovereignty are only properly address by Congress, not a lower Federal court). You would end up with a situation analogous to one company using a patent granted in the US while another company is paying for the license rights to a very similar US patent owned by the government of Canada so they can market a competing drug in the US. And if I read the summary right, it is on this basis that the judge ruled that a patent review can proceed. Regardless of who owns the patents, they are still patents issued by the US government for products being sold in the US.
Cynically of me, I don't think anybody involved expected this tactic to really work. They just thought it would long enough to make some money for them.
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If they thought it would succeed they likely would have asked for more.
Basically, the drug company was taking a long shot (300% return a year for the life of the patent), the tribe had literally nothing to lose (they got 13 million, plus left over profits after 50 if thwy succeeded).
I don't know how long the patent I good for, but 250 million over five years is a huge return on 13 million if it succeeded.
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However, the logic of why drugs are so expensive in the USA is easy to follow from this post.
Just write off $15M/year as the "research costs" that big pharma uses to justify overpriced meds.
That, and the $279.5M pharma spent in 2017 lobbying to "access" our lawmakers.
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>$15M/year as the "research costs" ... and the $279.5M pharma spent in 2017 lobbying to "access" our lawmakers.
It's a cheap reply and I hate to say it, but... cite please. Even something within an order of magnitude of that research/lobby expense ratio.
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Citation:
Wikipedia, "pharmaceutical lobbying" - do the math.
Open Secrets, same topic for year 2017.
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Challenge accepted:
OpenSecrets: $150 million/yr in lobbying expenses in 2018
The best I quickly could find for R&D is $160 billion In 2016.
Conclusion, you're off by more than 4 orders of magnitude. That's might be the worst 'guestimate' of all time.
GrokLaw (Score:2)
I still miss the clarity that Pam brought to the Law intersecting technology.
I learned enough from Groklaw to understand the outline of what this case means, but the fine points....
First, we seal all the lawyers in an airtight room (Score:1)
I have a solution.
First, we seal all the lawyers in an airtight room.
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