From Antiquity to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the tensions inherent in the interface of proprietary medicines and the strong reaction of society at large in respect of pharmaceutical inventors and rights holders. As this comprehensive collection of sources shows, these tensions have persisted since ancient times. The sources—along with headnotes and a deeply informed preamble—clearly illustrate how society has constructed intellectual property in association with medicines to adapt it to the needs of entrepreneurship and free trade, and, at the same time, accommodating it to the imperatives of public health.

Revealing two major lines of tension—trademarks versus generic designations and patents versus trade secrets—the texts deal with such aspects of the special intellectual property of medicines and access to health as the following:

• the question of whether inventions that are crucially important to save lives should be left in private hands to be exploited with a view on profitability;
• prohibiting the use of trademarks to designate certain medicines;
• loss of distinctiveness of some well-known pharmaceutical trademarks;
• sanitary authorities as a sort of a parallel trademark and patent office;
• the requirement of higher distinctiveness for pharmaceutical trademarks—the so-called duty of greater care;
• use of secrecy to secure private interests in pharmaceutical inventions;
• granting prizes and awards to inventors instead of acknowledging private proprietary rights in pharmaceuticals; and
• the protection of inventions in times of epidemics.

The sources are structured in two chapters (business identifiers—trademarks, geographical indications, shop signs—and appropriation of knowledge—patents, trade secrets) to permit an easy understanding of the enchainment of important moments that have contributed to give intellectual property for medicines its special configuration.

The selection of sources (more than 200) underlines the struggle of creative entrepreneurs in the pharmaceutical field to obtain a living from their trade and all the contradictions to which it gives rise, as well as approaches that governments have adopted to deal with its tensions. Practitioners in intellectual property law and healthcare law, magistrates, medical professionals, and academics will have a better sense of how the imperatives of public health have designed and continue designing norms and principles of intellectual property especially adapted to the social goals it serves.