Patrick Kilbride

Encouraged and abetted by free riders who would benefit unfairly from others’ work, well-intentioned lawmakers and judicial activists have compromised the U.S. patent system, threatening America’s prosperity and national security. But we have the chance to reverse this trend by supporting two bills that will be debated this week in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

One of the more interesting public policy reads of 2024 comes from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), whose “Drug Patent and Exclusivity Study” effectively debunks the false narratives and bogus statistics that have been levied against pharmaceutical patents with significant effect in recent years. The inescapable takeaway from the USPTO study is that activists have manipulated data to inflate the effects of patents and other exclusive rights on competition.

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth 1,000 words. Political affairs firm Neptune Ops suggests taking that truism to its logical conclusion: “[R]esearch shows that the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. … So, when Professor Adam Mossoff, a respected expert on intellectual property policy matters, posted on LinkedIn about the historical treatment of injunctive relief for IP infringement in the United States, I was inspired to take up Neptune’s challenge to try to deliver a compelling message about the significance—and availability—of injunctive relief mainly via AI-generated images.

When the Senate Judiciary Committee convened on May 21 for a hearing on Competition in the Prescription Drug Market, Senators were besieged with an array of tired and superficial arguments against patents for biopharmaceutical innovation. The main premise seemed to be that holding more than a single patent for a single product must be anti-competitive. These arguments fly in the face of technological, economic, and legal reality, where patents cover inventions and discoveries rather than products. The ubiquitous mobile phone by one estimate contains 250,000 patented inventions, each adding a unique capability or solving a technical problem, which collectively enable the whole phone to work as intended.

Imagine building a house and by law, 20 years from completion, all ownership rights to the asset expired permanently whether retained by the original owner or obtained through purchase. Notwithstanding rising real estate values, the ability to reap the benefit of that asset’s appreciation would decrease rapidly for every year the property was owned. After 20 years, as the house passed into the public domain, you might continue to live there, but its investment or resale value would effectively become zero. This is the reality for intellectual property rights, which are time-limited by law, a condition established by the U.S. Constitution.