Ghost Authorship of Medical Articles Considered Fraud

An article published yesterday in PLoS Medicine, and first presented at an event hosted by the CILP, by Professors Simon Stern and Trudo Lemmens has been receiving considerable media attention. Titled “Legal Remedies for Medical Ghostwriting: Imposing Fraud Liability on Guest Authors of Ghostwritten Articles“, Stern and Lemmens argue that “guest authorship is a disturbing violation of academic integrity standards, which form the basis of scientific reliability.” They continue, “The false respectability afforded to claims of safety and effectiveness through the use of academic investigators risks undermining the integrity of biomedical research and patient care.”

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Beyond Refusal to Deal: A Cross-Atlantic View of Copyright, Competition and Innovation Policies

Paul-Erik Veel and Professor Ariel Katz have recently released a paper comparing the Competition Law in the European Union and the United States. The abstract:

Conventional wisdom holds that the European Union, through the application of its competition law, has opted to subordinate intellectual property rights in the pursuit of competitive markets to a much greater extent than has the United States. We argue that, at least in the context of copyright protection, this conventional wisdom is false. Read the rest of this entry »

Canada’s Pharmaceutical IP Laws Stronger Than You Think

As globalization shrinks our world, new connections are being made in unexpected areas. One such connection is a proposed trade agreement between Canada and the European Union that could have substantial implications on the domestic costs of pharmaceutical drugs if passed. As part of the the trade negotiations, the E.U. has proposed changes to Canada’s drug patent system, which could potentially add billions to Canada’s prescription drug plan per year, an area where Canadians already spend spend $22 billion annually. Read the rest of this entry »

Prof. Iacobucci: Report on IP Protection for Pharmaceutical Companies

In response to the Canadian Intellectual Property Council’s (CIPC) report earlier this year, which claimed that Canada’s IP regime lags behind that of international competitors, Prof. Edward Iacobucci, Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto, has prepared his own. He argues that IP protection for pharmaceutical companies in Canada is actually stronger than that of other industrial sectors in Canada, and is in many ways stronger than pharmaceutical IP in the European Union and United States. Read the rest of this entry »

The First Sale Doctrine: What Antitrust Law Can (and Cannot) Teach

Professor Ariel Katz recently posted a new paper on SSRN.  The paper is based on a presentation that he gave at the Exhaustion and First Sale in IP Conference held at Santa Clara Law School last November.  Abstract:

“The first sale doctrine (or exhaustion) limits the exclusive rights that survive the initial authorized sale of an item protected by such rights.  The first sale doctrine has always been under pressure by owners of intellectual property rights, and courts have never been able to precisely outline its contours, or fully articulate its rationale. Recently, and somewhat counter-intuitively, insights borrowed from modern antitrust law and economics are invoked to provide a seemingly robust theoretical foundation for undermining exhaustion rules or narrowing their scope, and thereby strengthen IP owners’ control over downstream distribution and use of the goods they produce.” Read the rest of this entry »

Canada’s Inadequate Drug Patent Protection?

The Canadian Intellectual Property Council is urging Canada to toughen its patent protection for drug makers if it does not want to lose out on lucrative pharmaceutical investment and jobs to the U.S. and Europe.  According to its recent report, the life of a patent in Canada, once the drug is on the market, is significantly shorter than in any other G7 country.  The CIPC urges Ottawa to give patented drug makers up to five years of “restored” patent life to offset regulatory delays, exclusive use of drug trial data for an additional two years and legal tools to fight patent challenges launched by generic manufacturers.

Strengthening patent protection would not be without its problems too.  New drug prices will go up for consumers, insurers and provincial health plans.  The Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA) claims that if the patent changes sought by the industry are realized, it would cost Canadians up to $3billion a year in higher drug costs. Canada’s generic drug industry, along with several provincial governments, would also not see such legislation enacted without a fight.

But are drug regulations and innovation necessarily mutually exclusive?  Ariel Katz, Associate Professor at University of Toronto would claim that they are not.   In fact, he argues that a regulatory framework is not only not solely a burden on the industry, but that it also provides them a valuable service.  His full article can be accessed here.

Biobank Governance, Privacy, and Informed Consent: Austin and Lemmens

The Linguistic and Trust Functions of Trademarks

[Professor Katz's new paper is freely available on SSRN.]

Modern trademark scholarship and jurisprudence view trademark law as an institution aimed at improving the amount and quality of information available in the marketplace. Under this paradigm—known as the search-costs theory of trademarks—trademarks are socially beneficial because they reduce consumer search costs, and as a consequence provide producers with an incentive to maintain their goods and services at defined and persistent qualities.

Working within this paradigm, my recent paper refines the search-cost theory of trademarks. It highlights an important point whose significance hitherto has largely escaped notice, namely that reducing search costs and providing incentives to maintain quality are distinct functions, although they are related. Read the rest of this entry »

Exceptions Properly So-Called

Professor Abraham Drassinower has a new paper titled “Exceptions Properly So-Called“. The abstract is reproduced below.

The paper sets out to distinguish four kinds of copyright limitations, of which only one can be regarded as a true exception. There are (a) subject matter limitations, (b) scope limitations, (c) miscellaneous exceptions, and (d) exceptions properly so-called. The upshot of this classification is that “exceptions properly so-called” denote instances where copyright as a juridical order encounters claims recognized in other juridical orders, with the result that the resolution of the ensuing dispute requires reaching beyond or outside the copyright regime itself.

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