Supreme Court of Canada Voids Viagra Patent for Insufficient Disclosure

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6693/125/

by edj • 14 years ago

106 20 14 years ago

michaelgeist.ca

ars• 14 years ago

Now the most important question here is how will this effect spam levels.

Will they go up due to cheap viagra in canada hawked in the US?

Or will they go down since anyone who wants cheap viagra can get it from Canada?

If the US does not issue a similar ruling, one thing you can expect is histrionics about banning drugs from Canada, even more than there already is.

rpledge• 14 years ago

With generic drugs coming on the market, Pfizer will certainly soon face some stiff competition.

jgw• 14 years ago

They must be disappointed that their patent just didn't stand up.

tehayj• 14 years ago

It was quite obvious they couldn't keep it up for any longer. The harder the competition, the better the fight.

neilk• 14 years ago

Take pun threads to Reddit, please.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/12wy98/viagra_pat...

aroberge• 14 years ago

The Supreme Court of Canada is extremely well respected by a majority of Canadians and this ruling is a very good example of the reason why it is so well respected.

waterside81• 14 years ago

Fellow Canadian here - indeed. You'd be hard pressed to guess which way a particular Justice leans politically, unlike our cousins to the south. Heck, our Chief Justice excused herself from Conrad Black's potential hearing because she didn't want to be in a conflict of interest. That's integrity right there.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1285112-...

jpzeni• 14 years ago

We just lean differently up here - federalist instead of sovereigntist. Take a look at this political cartoon that was in Le Devoir during the reference re secession of Quebec - http://jpzeni.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=64

graeham• 14 years ago

Worth mentioning the patent was set to expire in Canada in ~18 months anyways. The US patent was set to expire in early 2012 but coverage appears to have been extended to 2019. The bigger resulting effect here might be from the establishment of a precedent of the wording that the court is expecting in patent filings. In the full ruling below, the main missing disclosure I can see is:

"Only sildenafil, the subject of Claim 7 and the active compound in Viagra, had been shown to be effective in treating ED at the time of the patent application. Although the patent includes the statement that “one of the especially preferred compounds induces penile erection in impotent males”, the patent application does not disclose that the compound that works is sildenafil, that it is found in Claim 7, or that the remaining compounds had not been found to be effective in treating ED."

The full ruling is here http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2012/2012scc60/2012scc60...

PotatoEngineer• 14 years ago

Ouch, that's nasty. A patent claim that lists a bunch of compounds, of which only one works? No wonder the court struck it down; the filing itself is actively obstructing knowledge.

Osiris• 14 years ago

The problem I have with software patents is that they basically do the same thing. They request monopoly power over the invention while not disclosing how someone in the field could implement it, which would require source code, etc.

Since software patents don't disclose enough for another programmer to implement the invention, I don't see how they are benefiting society. They don't share the knowledge but still get the monopoly benefit.

Tipzntrix• 14 years ago

Personally I think a lot of software patents explain well enough that I could implement their "invention".

It's just that the invention is so simple/obvious to us that I wonder how they got a patent and no prior art was found.

Nogwater• 14 years ago

Lack of prior art should be used to establish novelty, not obviousness. The test for obviousness should be based on the proposed solution, not the problem.

Sniffnoy• 14 years ago

Agreed.

I'd also like to note that the quid-pro-quo model of patents suggests that, in fact, it shouldn't be enough for the solution to be non-obvious: It should have to be non-obvious even once you have been told such a thing exists. Because if the mere knowledge of the existence of something would be sufficient to render how to do it obvious, the inventor cannot hope to keep its workings secret once it is released, and so we are trading for something that would be worthless anyway.

malandrew• 14 years ago

There is a second part of the patent quid pro quo deal that is often glossed over and that is "... without undue experimentation". For many ideas, the idea is enough to allow someone to reproduce it, but for a large subset of those ideas, a person skilled in the art would still have to go through undue experimentation if there is no source code available.

Source code is often the only way for someone to recreate an idea disclosed via software patent without undue experimentation.

heliosvc• 14 years ago

Patent laws generally could certainly be improved.

But by far the biggest problem is software patents. There's no need to make all patents (software, hardware, pharma, etc.) the same because the industries and the cost structures / innovation cycles are very different.

protomyth• 14 years ago

I do wonder if this will have an effect on investment and research into medicines. If the cost of creating drugs (used to work in clinical trials) becomes greater than the return, I can see some problems.

namank• 14 years ago

Hahahaha...this is why I love the Canadian legal system! Courts here go back to the founding principle behind a law and not just conclusion resulting from rules of the game.

Go Canada.

Supreme Court of Canada Voids Viagra Patent for Insufficient Disclosure

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