"Copy Protection" - Patent It
Thursday, November 22, 2007SUSIE GHARIB, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT ANCHOR: While artistic and literary works are protected by copyright, inventors rely on another form of protection --patents. A new patent gives the inventor certain exclusive rights over his or her invention for 20 years. During that time, others who want to use a patented item must obtain permission, which usually means paying a license fee. But, as Dana Greenspon reports, the patent system is straining to keep up with rapid changes in technology.
DANA GREENSPON, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: For more than a decade, scientists at Panacos have been on the cutting edge of HIV research. The company`s major discovery, a drug called Bevirimat, which prevents the HIV virus from maturing and becoming infectious. The hope is that Bevirimat, patented in 1997, will become the first effective treatment against drug-resistant strains of HIV. COO Graham Allaway says the patent system is key to his company`s growth.
GRAHAM ALLAWAY, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, PANACOS: Clearly for a company like ours to be able to develop such a novel drug, we need to be able to have some element of market exclusivity through the patent system. The reason for that is it takes many years and many millions of dollars to develop a drug for any indication, certainly for HIV.
GREENSPON: Market exclusivity is a hallmark of the U.S. patent system, which gives patent holders control over their inventions for 20 years from the date the patent application is filed. To obtain that patent protection, the inventor needs to show the U.S. Patent Office that an invention is new, useful and non-obvious. The process can take anywhere from 12 months to five years. And the average cost, including legal fees, ranges from $6,000 to $25,000 for a single patent. Panacos holds nine patents in the United States and has another 19 awaiting approval. The company is constantly on the search for new patentable discoveries. So what are you guys doing in this one?
ALLAWAY: Well, this is where we are doing some of our major drug screening.
GREENSPON: So when you`re searching for new potential compounds in here, you`re also sort of searching for new potential patents?
ALLAWAY: Absolutely.
GREENSPON: Panacos illustrates how it`s possible to register many different types of patents for a single product. Of the six patents the company has for Bevirimat, only one is for the chemical compound itself. The other patents range from the process used to create the drug, to the part of the HIV virus the drug targets. Jon Dudas is director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He says today his office not only receives more types of patent applications, but also more complex ones.
JON DUDAS, DIRECTOR, US PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE: The applications grow in complexity every year. So what you saw 20 years ago were certainly simpler technologies than they are today. And there`s so much more technology out there today, which is a good thing for our economy, but it`s a challenge for our office.
GREENSPON: A challenge the office has tried to address by hiring 1,200 new examiners a year. Even still, each year the office is swamped with about 450,000 applications. Only about 50 percent will result in patents. Congress is now considering a bill to reform the patent system. High-tech companies like Microsoft and HP support the bill. HP`s Michael Holston says there is a need to update a system that hasn`t seen sweeping changes for more than 50 years.
MICHAEL HOLSTON, EXEC. VP & GENERAL COUNSEL, HP: Making a long- distance telephone call was high-tech in the 1950s and as the law has evolved and things have changed, there`s just a tremendous need to go back and revisit the system.
GREENSPON: Graham Allaway of Panacos agrees the patent system is imperfect, but he`s concerned that proposed reforms might weaken existing patent protections.
ALLAWAY: If we didn`t have patents, our value would be less than 10 percent of what it is, because really the patents are an indicator of the value of all the ideas and the programs that we`re developing.
GREENSPON: But getting a patent isn`t always the end of the process. A patent can be challenged in court and the number of patent cases in U.S. courts has gone up by almost 50 percent over the past decade. Dana Greenspon, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Gaithersburg, Maryland.
