Compulsory Licensing of Patents During Pandemics

Wealthy countries with major pharmaceutical industries have historically supported strong patent rights and opposed temporarily abrogating them—even to save lives. However, as drug shortages have become commonplace due to COVID-19, governments have begun reassessing their views. The European Union and various countries have issued new policies and passed legislation facilitating their ability to provide drugs to their citizens for the duration of the pandemic. They have signaled a willingness to do so through “compulsory licensing,” in which the government issues a license to a third party to produce a patented invention without the patent holder’s permission and pays the patent holder compensation. By contrast, the United States has opposed compulsory licensing of drugs for several decades. Although the Biden administration supports lower-income countries seeking to license patented drugs, it remains opposed to the practice to provide drugs for its own citizens, even during drug shortages. This Article provides an overview of compulsory licensing and examines the U.S. government’s inconsistent views regarding its use. It further discusses how other high-income countries have facilitated compulsory licensing during the pandemic. It then proposes legislative and contractual solutions for addressing future pandemic-related drug shortages in the United States. This includes expanding third-party manufacturers’ ability to petition for a compulsory license and requiring companies to provide an adequate supply of patented drugs that were developed with government funds, or else be required to license out their technology and know-how to willing third-party manufacturers

Regulating Digital Trade

Under § 337 of the Tariff Act, the International Trade Commission (ITC) has jurisdiction over articles that enter the country and infringe intellectual property rights. Recently, the ITC vastly expanded its powers, asserting jurisdiction over imported digital files that infringe intellectual property rights. This Article examines the limits of the ITC’s authority, arguing that it lacks jurisdiction over digital information, because information in the abstract cannot be controlled by a court or an agency. It maintains that the ITC has misconstrued the breadth of its statutory authority under the Tariff Act and that the traditional tools of statutory interpretation show that Congress intended for the term “articles” to be limited to tangible personal property. Finally, this Article discusses how interest groups including the Motion Picture Association of America are attempting to use the ITC to block information at the U.S. border, and considers the significant risks that this poses to the public welfare

Centralizing Pharmaceutical Innovation

The United States has a mostly decentralized system for promoting new medicine development. By offering patents and regulatory exclusivities, the government incentivizes pharmaceutical companies to invent and bring to market new medicines. Although this development model offers benefits for promoting innovation, it comes at a cost: Market-based incentives lead companies to prioritize research and development (“R&D”) for medicines that offer a safe path to profitability, as opposed to those that offer the greatest social benefit. In particular, pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to invest in R&D for critically-needed antibiotics and infectious disease vaccines—both of which are difficult to develop and provide uncertain financial returns. This Article proposes that the government oversee the development of needed “infrastructure-adjacent medicines”— medicines that can help prevent future collapses of the public healthcare system and mitigate major economic harm. In addition to boosting internal R&D in such critical areas, the government could directly support innovation by exclusively licensing promising drug candidates from small- to mid-sized entities or by purchasing small biotechnology companies on the open market. When suitable private partners are not available, the government could oversee the final stages of development and retain control over the resulting intellectual property rights. This approach would allow private-sector pharmaceutical development to continue to flourish while filling a critical public health gap

Judging Patents

Patent litigation is regarded as the “neurosurgery of litigation.” To adjudicate these cases, judges must grasp complex technology underlying the claims at issue, notwithstanding the fact that many judges lack relevant science or technology backgrounds. This problem is compounded by the fact that judges generally lack access to neutral expertise, forcing them to rely upon party-hired experts for tutorials. By contrast, several European patent courts utilize technically qualified judges who work side by side with their legally trained counterparts to decide patent cases. The integration of technical expertise into the judiciary improves the speed of litigation, provides the court with unbiased information, and likely increases the accuracy of the judges’ claim construction. This Article examines the role of technical expertise in patent litigation and discusses obstacles to U.S. district courts obtaining assistance. It then looks at the use of technically qualified judges in Germany and Switzerland, as well as in the European Union’s proposed Unified Patent Court, and it discusses advantages and disadvantages of their use. The Article finally proposes increasing technical expertise in the U.S. judiciary by utilizing technically trained judges or staff. It further suggests streamlining all U.S. patent litigation into a group of urban district courts, which could employ neutral technical experts

Automatic Segmentation of Broadcast News Audio using Self Similarity Matrix

Generally audio news broadcast on radio is com- posed of music, commercials, news from correspondents and recorded statements in addition to the actual news read by the newsreader. When news transcripts are available, automatic segmentation of audio news broadcast to time align the audio with the text transcription to build frugal speech corpora is essential. We address the problem of identifying segmentation in the audio news broadcast corresponding to the news read by the newsreader so that they can be mapped to the text transcripts. The existing techniques produce sub-optimal solutions when used to extract newsreader read segments. In this paper, we propose a new technique which is able to identify the acoustic change points reliably using an acoustic Self Similarity Matrix (SSM). We describe the two pass technique in detail and verify its performance on real audio news broadcast of All India Radio for different languages.Comment: 4 pages, 5 image