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Patents and Coronavirus – The Right to Repair

In March, 2020, two engineers in Brescia, Italy used a desktop 3D printing machine to fabricate needed replacement valves for more than 100 ventilator machines being used to treat coronavirus patients at a local hospital. News reports claim that the ventilator valves fabricated in Italy for a cost of about 1 Euro each were previously sold by the manufacturer for 10,000 Euro each. There is some debate about what happened next, but early news feeds reported that a parts manufacturer threatened to sue the engineers for infringing patents on the replacement valve. While the existence of the threat and the patents remains murky, the incident sparked legal commentary regarding the risk that volunteers fabricating parts for lifesaving devices, and the hospitals that use them, could be liable for patent infringement.

Civil Society Letter to WIPO Director General Francis Gurry on Covid-19 and Intellectual Property

We write to you as organisations and individuals representing researchers, educators, students, and the institutions that support them, to encourage WIPO to take a clear stand in favour of ensuring that intellectual property regimes are a support, and not a hindrance, to efforts to tackle both the Coronavirus outbreak and its consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright light on how important intellectual property limitations and exceptions can be to development and human flourishing. Researchers discovered the spread of the virus through a text and data mining project analyzing copyrighted news articles, enabled by Canada’s flexible fair dealing right for research purposes. The earliest potential treatments have been developed through existing medicines, enabled by experimental use exceptions to patent rights.