Imagine your outrage if the government made it illegal to protect your wallet from pickpockets. Yet this is life on the economic streets for pharmaceutical companies that apply for “ancillary” patents to protect and extend their exclusive rights to profit from drugs they discovered. Bristol-Myers Squibb, for example, recently was fined $680 million for using such devices to protect the patents on its anti-anxiety drug BuSpar and on its cancer drug Taxol. Pfizer was criticized for receiving a patent extension on its epilepsy drug Neurontin. And the Federal Trade Commission has barred the Canadian drug company Biovail from using ancillary patent filings to protect its heart drug Tiazac.

The whole patent piracy topic has been dear to my heart - so I was delighted to find some commentary in Barron’s in their June 2 edition. Since I am pretty sure that you won’t have any access to the article’s online version, read it here on iserloh.com…