One of the things supposed to make America the best place in the world to live is its free market economy. If you listen to the propaganda, you believe you can buy anything you want in the US and, for the most part, the power of competition forces all traders and service providers to keep their prices low. Supposedly, if you don’t like the price or the quality of what’s on offer from one supplier, you can take your business elsewhere. This is all great in theory, but it breaks down when you get on to the subject of intellectual property rights. Now you can’t download music from anyone except iTunes and the roof falls on your head if you start up a business selling sodas and call it Pepsi. The idea of copyright or trademarks is simple. If you wrote the music and the lyrics, you own the rights and everyone has to pay to listen to them. Equally, anyone who brands a business gets a monopoly on the use of the name. No other business can copy your name and pass off its products as the brand. The predatory way in which all this works is most obvious in the patent market where anyone with a new idea can get a monopoly to exploit it. If anyone else tries to copy it, courts are quick to issue an injunction and damages follow. You can’t have failed to see news of the big cases between the technology companies, arguing who has the rights to mobile phones and hand-held devices.
Out of the public eye, the drug manufacturers protect their monopolies. They rely on local patents to keep the competition out of the US market and a lot of propaganda to slime the online pharmacies as unsafe places to buy your must-have drugs. Of course, they are more worried about the cheaper prices charged by the online pharmacies taking their business away rather than public safety. But the message comes out continuously and strong. Wherever possible, the manufacturers avoid court cases. This can be bad publicity. The common strategy is to pay foreign manufacturers not to make generic copies. But, every now and again, the foreign company will not play ball, i.e. it asks for too much money. So now we see Pfizer taking an Israeli company to court. This is Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd and it’s one of the larger generic manufacturers. In 2004, it applied to the FDA for a licence to make and sell as generic version of viagra. The FDA has indicated its willingness to grant the licence, but has yet to actually do so. If it does, the licensed generic version will eat into Pfizer’s profits. Hence, the action seeking an injunction to prevent Teva from launching the generic.
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