Trips Agreement Patents
The most attractive aspect of process patents is that they are the core of what capitalism stands for: competition, efficiency and profitability; However, when used correctly, they can be extremely beneficial for patients in developing countries. Most research-based pharmaceutical companies would likely disagree with this view, arguing that a process patent provides little incentive to invest in risky research because another company may simply reverse engineer a drug to find another method of manufacturing the product, thereby circumventing the process patent. However, process patents in this situation may prove acceptable to research-based pharmaceutical companies and improve the public health situation in developing areas. 3The June deadline was not agreed upon and was subsequently extended to March 2005. The March deadline also passed without an agreement, but on 6 December 2005, the WTO finally reached consensus on amending the TRIPS Agreement. This amendment follows the principles agreed on 30 August 2003. Member States have until 1 December 2007 to ratify the amendment so that it can be formally incorporated into the TRIPS Agreement. The World Trade Organization is the body that regulates international trade between its member countries. It is the only organization of its kind in the world and therefore has a huge influence on international trade policy. Although bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements exist and are permitted under WTO rules, no other agreement has been a driving force behind globalization and the liberalization of trade barriers than the series of agreements that make up the WTO. The WTO allows representatives of member countries to come together to form agreements that are essential to the functioning of the WTO and the expansion of world trade. There are three such agreements: gatt (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) and TRIPS Agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) (5).
7This statement is irrefutable and redundant, but will play an important role in the criticism. Its task is to limit the scope of criticism to the provisions and implementation of the TRIPS Agreement itself and not to its existence or factors outside its competence. The aim is to apply the recommendations directly to the current legal framework. The most important rule regarding patentability is that patents for any invention, whether a product or a process, are available without discrimination in all areas of technology if those inventions meet the standard substantive criteria for patentability, namely novelty, inventive step and industrial applicability. In addition, members are required to make the grant of a patent conditional on appropriate disclosure of the invention and may request information on how best to enforce it. Disclosure is an essential part of the statutes of the grant of a patent, as it makes available to the public important technical information that may be useful to others in the further development of technology in this field, even during the term of the patent, and ensures that the invention truly becomes in the public domain after the expiry of the patent term because others have the necessary information, to execute them. The TRIPS Agreement is the subject of criticism at several levels. There are those who criticize the implementation of its provisions in sovereign countries, there are others who criticize the provisions of the TRIPS Agreement, and there are still others who criticize its very existence. Further criticism of the TRIPS Agreement will be based on the following neutral principles in order to make the recommendations as relevant and applicable as possible to the current situation: but the question of what deserves to be patented is left to countries. The agreement simply states that patents must be granted for new, inventive and useful inventions – but it does not define these terms. Deciding whether a new formulation (making a pill version of a drug that was previously available in powder form) or a new combination (combining two or more existing molecules into a new pill), for example, deserves a new twenty-year patent is a prerogative of countries and is not determined by WTO texts.
Countries should therefore determine what types of inventions in the field of pharmaceuticals merit patents taking into account their own social and economic conditions. This is exactly what some governments, such as Brazil, Thailand or India, have done. In today`s world, this decision can be a matter of life and death for many patients. A wide range of drugs are developed and manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, and the TRIPS Agreement must distinguish between patents for Viagra and patents for efavirenz. It is reasonable to ask for full 20 years of intellectual property protection for `chemical toys` (17), but when it comes to vital essential medicines, certain concessions must be made in favour of the promotion of public health. The term `essential medicinal product` should be defined in the context of the TRIPS Agreement, not in relation to a list of diseases, as has been proposed in the past, (18) but as a general description of what constitutes the difference between an essential and a non-essential medicinal product. The possible criteria for inclusion in such a category would be: availability of an alternative treatment, severity of the disease that the drug is intended to treat, and the ability of the patentee to adequately supply the markets that require the patented product. However, in order to benefit from separate definitions, separate provisions should be made, where appropriate. Ideally, two separate patent laws would exist in parallel; one concerns medicines considered essential and the other applies to non-essential medicines. The provisions of the TRIPS Agreement range from trivial to controversial. The conditions include a minimum period of patent protection of twenty years from the date of the patent application. .
