infoJustice

Muhammad Zaheer Abbas

Abstract: The current COVID-19 pandemic has put the problem of equitable access to health technologies in the limelight because governments across the globe are struggling to meet the health needs of their populations. Patent exclusivities add to the cost of healthcare by allowing supra-competitive prices of protected technologies. There is a pressing need to mobilize all means and resources to promote price-reducing generic competition. Civil society organizations can make an enormous difference by successfully opposing questionable patents. Patent opposition is an administrative safeguard which procedurally enables community organizations to play this crucial role as defenders of the public interest. This paper supports the adoption of the patent opposition procedural safeguard as it provides civil society organizations with an affordable and practically feasible mechanism to challenge validity of questionable patents. Relying on patent litigation alone to weed out invalid patents is not an economically and practically efficient approach for resource-constrained community organizations as patent litigation is costly and cumbersome. This paper draws upon real-world examples of prominent civil society organizations in order to highlight the potential role of community engagement in the patent system. This paper proposes the establishment of specialized civil society organizations which have requisite techno-legal capacity to harness full potential of meaningful community engagement in the patent system.

Citation: Abbas, Muhammad Zaheer (2021) Civil Society’s Meaningful Engagement in the Patent System for a More Profound Real-World Impact. (2022) 32(3) Australian Intellectual Property Journal 189-199.

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