In a statement to PTI, the OPPI President has pointed out that “There are examples wherein Indian pharmaceutical companies are applying for patents based on incremental innovations in third markets like the US and Europe.”
Well, in that case why doesn’t the OPPI come out with its own report publicizing these facts and numbers? I’ve heard the above quoted statement a thousand times before but am yet to see any of the innovator companies actually come out with hard facts and figures. If what the OPPI is saying is right then in that case the IPA’s claims of being above the board would lose complete credibility.
It is even more distressing to witness the lack of enthusiasm in OPPI’s response to the public debates generated over IP policy and patent grants, especially since its member companies are often the ones being attacked. For example as much as I searched I could not find a single response by the OPPI to the superbly publicized report of Mr. T.C. James of the National Intellectual Property Organization (NIPO).
What is surprising is that despite the widespread publicity that the NIPO report has received from all quarters, a copy of the same is not yet available on the internet. As things stand now it is not even clear as to whether NIPO’s report is different from IPA’s report. Unfortunately it is not possible to make an independent assessment since both these organizations are yet to release their reports on the internet. Given that some of the content of these reports may be equivalent to ‘trade libel’ it would probably be better that they were not publicized too widely.
no one is ‘holy’:
from my personal experience, i can tell u that the ever-greening concept applies to both sides of the divide (ipa n oppi). historically, it has always been in the oppi’s interest to play down this factor as it had the lion’s share in the proceeds arising out of such (mal)practice. probably, that largely explains why oppi has so far not undertaken any such exercise (i.e. finding out the empirical data about how many ipa companies r involved in evergreening in how many countries in how many products). oppi wud never wud ve done it so, unless pushed to the wall. lets c when such a time comes when oppi is forced to do something on this line. [once representing an innovator, v had very cautiously brought this point out, but the flip-side of such an argument is that it tends to bring the ‘evergreening’ issue into sharp focus, wich may b counter-productive for the innovator companies].
-aditya kant
perhaps part of the difficulty with this whole exercise is that the term “evergreening” is so imprecise and hard to measure. Not all incremental innovations constitute evergreening, of course, but some certainly do, and we don’t seem to have particularly useful and reliable ways of distinguishing. As a result you end up with OPPI saying, on the one hand, “we don’t evergreen, we innovate incrementally” while, on the other hand, on the basis of IPA firms’ patent applications for incremental innovations, saying “look, IPA firms evergreen too.”
@ Aditya – I think the OPPI has been pushed to the wall with the IPA’s report.
@foln16 – I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The difficulty lies in diffrentiating ‘evergreening’ from ‘incremental innovation’.