Tournament: Little Rock Central | Round: 2 | Opponent: JPG Pourciau | Judge: Mills, Alex
Richards, K. T., and Hickey, K. J. (2020, February 11). Drug Pricing and Pharmaceutical Patenting Practices. Congressional Research Service. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R46221.pdf.
Patents, which are available for a wide variety of technologies beyond pharmaceuticals, grant the patent holder the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, or importing a patented invention within the United States for a defined term of years. A person who makes, uses, sells, or imports a patented invention without permission from the patent holder during this period infringes the patent and is potentially liable for monetary damages and subject to other legal remedies. Patents are generally justified on the basis that temporary exclusive rights are necessary to provide incentives for inventors to create new and useful technological innovations. This rationale maintains that absent legal protections, competitors could freely copy inventions once marketed, denying the original creators the ability to recoup their investments in time and effort, and reducing the incentive to create in the first place.46 Patent incentives are said to be particularly necessary for products like pharmaceuticals, which are costly to develop, but easily copied once marketed. Because patents grant a temporary and limited “monopoly” to the patent holder, they may lead to increased prices for goods or services that the patent covers. The existence of a patent on a particular manufacturing process, for example, generally means that only the patent holder (and persons licensed by the patent holder) can use that patented process until the patent expires. In some circumstances, this legal exclusivity may allows the patent holder (or her licensees) to charge higher-than-competitive prices for goods made with the patented process, as a monopolist would, because the patent effectively shields the patentee from competition.
If we work to reduce IPR protections, we can increase the amount of generic