In September, Hythiam received a patent in Mexico for its cocaine addiction treatment product and was granted a patent from the Europe Patent Office for its alcohol dependence product.
And the day after a product patent expires, copycats show up in supermarkets.
He is then typically granted the sole right to sell the product for 17-20 years from the time the patent application was filed.
Congress could introduce transferable exclusivity that would allow a drug company that markets a new drug for a rare disease to extend the patent on any product in its portfolio by a given period.
In the worst case scenario, poor farmers could even end up being obliged to pay royalties to the patent holder on a product their forebears had grown for generations.
His biggest concern is that "a very high percentage of our revenue is going to go off-patent within the next product cycle, " meaning in seven years, the time it takes to develop a new drug.
By law, any patents that are deemed to be necessary to make a standards compliant product must be licensed by the patent owner at fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
FORBES: Thermonuclear Stand Down: Apple And Google Are Ready To Arbitrate On Patents
Even though the world is getting smaller and smaller, very few startups can yet afford to patent or even sell their product in all the relevant countries at once.
In the United States, generics are dirt cheap, while the market for patent protected medicines is one of the most lucrative markets for any product.
The biggest difference between those technologies and the patent for which Apple filed is the amount of power consumed by the product, said Michael Filler, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar specializing in photovoltaics.
The biggest differences in those technologies and the patent for which Apple filed is the amount of power consumed by the product, said Michael Filler, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar specializing in photovoltaics.
This was a way of capturing some of the investment made in developing the product or service, and typically resulted in a narrowly focused patent that could be used to prevent direct competition.
FORBES: Old Model: Patents Protect Products. New Model: Patents Themselves Are Products
According to the 2010 RBC Capital Markets study, when trial victories, settlements between drugmakers and dropped cases are combined, generic companies were able to bring their product to market before the brand-name drug's patent expired in 76 percent of the 371 drug patent suits decided from 2000 through 2009.
The cash balance provides more than sufficient firepower for new product development and patent enforcement.
Product A was about to go off-patent and become available as a generic, and we were trying to anticipate the effect this would have on sales of Product B, still on patent.
Chris Green, tech analyst at DMG Europe, told the BBC: "It's noticeable that in the last two to three years the pace of product development has slowed down because everyone is terrified of patent disputes, ".
When his company sold its product in 2011 to a customer already embroiled in patent litigation, the plaintiff in the action then added Skyfire's technology to its suit, says Mr. Glueck, who declined to go into specifics.
Does anyone imagine that these manufacturing delays were occurring back when these companies were making big bucks on the product, achieved by the huge mark-ups that accompany receipt of the patent protection that bars others from competing?
As is the case with Apple's patent contributions, however, we'll wait to see whether the patent is granted and whether these ideas will ever crystallize into a genuine product.
Recently a U.S. federal court upheld Ranbaxy's patent challenge against GlaxoSmithKline's Augmentin, a product that augments the unpatented antibiotic amoxicillin with a chemical that attacks a bacterial defense against antibiotics.
The Google patent described sensors that, among other things, disable touch inputs when the product is positioned close to a person.
Patent-to-product mapping, financial metrics and organizational data are critical to deliver the insight needed to effectively run an IP business unit that increases business value.
India's patent office rejected the company's patent application, arguing the drug was not a new medicine but an amended version of its earlier product.
应用推荐