In 2002, a number of associations requested the Korean Patent Office to issue a compulsory license for the manufacture of a drug under the Korean patent provision which permits the issue of compulsory licensing for public non-commercial use. This provision in the Korean patent act was introduced in 1995 ostensibly to comply with Article 31 of the TRIPS Agreement which permits the issue of compulsory licenses without prior consultations with the patent holder. In a change of strategy, the objection to the issue of a compulsory license for the drug, Gleevec, was filed not by the patent holder or by PhRMA, the association and lobby group of the pharmaceutical industry, but by certain individuals claiming to have legal expertise, and sympathizers of the pharmaceutical industry. The objection raised was based on the concept of legitimate expectation, a concept not applicable in the case of the TRIPS Agreement. The objections raised do not appear to be supported by a legal argument and appear to be arbitrary in nature. In addition, they appear to reflect PhRMA’s aims of curtailing the flexibility inherent in the TRIPS Agreement.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia in its series Economics Working Papers with number
wp03-15.