Thread by @andrew_lilico

A thread on "patent extension." The trade docs Labour leaked ystrdy included a section (p119ff) discussing "Patent Extension". Labour claimed this means the US is seeking to make medicine patents last longer in the UK, meaning more expensive drugs. That is categorically wrong. 1/

In both the US & UK the term of a patent is the same: 20 yrs. However, medicines can take many yrs to be authorised for sale, so instead of a 20 yr patent meaning 20 yrs of exclusive sales, it might only grant 10 yrs or less. 2/

For this reason, in both the US & UK (via the EU) there is a system for extending the period of intellectual property protection for medicines. In the US that's called "Patent Extension". In the UK (via the EU) it's called "Supplementary Protection". But the effect's the same. 3/

Whether the provision for extended protection comes via "Supplementary Protection" or "Patent Extension" the maximum length is the same: 5 years. (It isn't guaranteed to be 5 yrs, btw. That depends on things like how long into the patent marketing authorisation was granted.) 4/

When one has "talks about talks" about an FTA, such as the UK & US did in 2017 & 2018, the obvious & natural place to start is with matters that always arise in FTAs. Extended protection of medicine patents has featured in all the big FTAs of recent years. 5/

eg, patent extension provisions appear in the:
NAFTA
EU-South Korea FTA (2009).
EU-Canada FTA (CETA)
EU-Japan FTA
draft EU-MERCOSUR FTA
So if you are going to discuss any modern FTA, you discuss its medicine patent extension provisions. 6/

In the case of the US-UK "talks about talks" the discussion of patent extension provisions was pretty mundane, since there wasn't much to talk about as we already have virtually identical systems for that. The text in the trade docs noted we had the same rules & moved on. 7/

Thus the discussion of "patent extension" in the leaked US-UK trade docs was not a discussion of making UK patents longer. It was a discussion that noted that the systems the UK & US already have for supplementary pharma patent provision are equivalent. Nothing more to it. 8/ends