Compulsory licensing of generic drugs remains mired in quagmires

Compulsory licensing of generic drugs remains mired in quagmires.

The goal was straightforward and highly-laudable: find ways of providing access to cheaper, generic versions of patented drugs in developing countries to combat public health crises resulting from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria or other epidemics. Yet, nearly a decade after global agencies began to pave the way for developing countries to buy or manufacture patented medicines at low prices to ...

An exploration of compulsory licensing as an effective policy tool for antiretroviral drugs in India.

Access to affordable drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and other diseases is increasingly challenging in many developing countries such as Brazil, South Africa, and India. These challenges are in part the result of strengthened patent laws mandated by the 1994 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) treaty. However, there are underutilized instruments within TRIPS that g...

Compulsory Licensing and Access to Medicine in Developing Countries

Compulsory patent licensing and local drug manufacturing capacity in Africa.

Africa has the highest disease burden in the world and continues to depend on pharmaceutical imports to meet public health needs. As Asian manufacturers of generic medicines begin to operate under a more protectionist intellectual property regime, their ability to manufacture medicines at prices that are affordable to poorer countries is becoming more circumscribed. The Doha Declaration on the ...

Compulsory licensing of technology and the essential facilities doctrine

We look at compulsory licensing of intellectual property as remedy for anti-competitive practice. We identify aspects of intellectual property that warrants a different remedy from those using general definitions and remedies for essential facility. Based on the analysis, we present a characterisation of optimal compulsory licensing for a simple market. ∗Department of Economics, University of A...