Posts Tagged: "pandemic"

More than 30 leading conservative and libertarian organizations have joined on a letter to Congress, voicing “strong opposition” to principles, recently unveiled by four senior lawmakers, that would deny exclusivity to inventors of COVID-19 medicines. The legislators, U.S. Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Lloyd Doggett (D-Tex.), say they aim “to ensure any COVID-19 drug will be accessible and affordable for all people.” The proposed items are expected to show up in a contemplated coronavirus economic recovery package, the fourth in three months.

“The COVID-19 crisis has once more highlighted the need for incentivizing investment and innovation—and thus, for patent laws that duly “promote” and protect such “progress,” precisely as our Founders envisioned,” writes Chief Judge Paul Michel, now retired from the Federal Circuit. As he so often is, Judge Michel is absolutely correct. Many are asking why testing for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has been slow to roll out, and why tests in many countries are inaccurate. Those familiar with U.S. patent laws understand the problem. There has been a deemphasis on medical diagnostics in America as the result of a series of Supreme Court and Federal Circuit rulings, coupled with Congressional inaction.

The COVID-19 crisis has once more highlighted the need for incentivizing investment and innovation—and thus, for patent laws that duly “promote” and protect such “progress,” precisely as our Founders envisioned. See U.S. Const., Art. I., § 8, cl. 8. Indeed, those patent-based incentives over the years have helped produce life-saving medicines, tests, treatments, and cures; once-unimaginable computer technology, robotics, and nanotechnology; LASIK eye-surgery and cochlear implants; personal satellite-based navigation systems; handheld devices seemingly straight out of Star Trek; 3-D printer technology; and much, much more. Nevertheless, a series of judicial rulings over the past 15 years have steadily eroded U.S. patent protections. Consequently, once-innovative companies, including major innovative pharmaceutical companies, have divested in R&D, and investors more generally have diverted funding to non-inventive areas (like entertainment) or to countries (like China) whose patent laws offer protections more favorable than U.S. law. American innovation has fallen accordingly.

Since China announced the first fatality caused by a virus about which little was known at the time, coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has grown to pandemic proportions. In the less than three months since that first death, this new strain of the severe acute respiratory syndrome-related (SARS) coronavirus has shuttered social gatherings, precipitated a mandatory work-from-home revolution and decimated large parts of the world’s economy. As of the afternoon of March 27, the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University reports that more than 585,000 cases of COVID-19 infection have been confirmed worldwide, resulting in a total of 26,819 deaths. Those figures have been increasing exponentially each day.

An essential element of trade secret protection is that the owner has made “reasonable” efforts to keep the information a secret. But as the Uniform Trade Secrets Act tells us, those efforts must be reasonable “under the circumstances.” When circumstances change, as they have recently, we need to recalibrate. In fact, when things return to whatever normal turns out to be, this will be an excellent opportunity for every organization to revisit the way in which it approaches management of its most important information assets.

As outside general counsel to over 150 emerging growth companies in recent years, as well as to their venture capital and growth equity investors, and as someone who represents buyers and sellers in M&A transactions, I am often asked how to protect businesses from interruption to their key customer and supplier relationships. Specifically, in the age of COVID-19, now characterized by the World Health Organization as a “global pandemic,” I am being asked whether a counter-party can trigger a “material adverse change” clause to terminate a contract.