An Indian patents appeals board on 14 September dismissed Bayer AG's petition seeking a stay on the "compulsory license" issued to Natco Pharma for selling generic copies of cancer drug Nexavar in India, a spokesman for the board said.The decision is a setback to the German drugmaker, which had sought to block the entry of Natco's generic version of Nexavar, which the Indian firm has been told to sell at Rs 8,800 for a monthly dose."The stay petition is dismissed but the main matter is pending," the spokesman told Reuters over the telephone from the southern city of Chennai on Monday."We are disappointed with the decision of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board to reject the stay petition on the compulsory license granted to Natco for Nexavar," a Bayer spokesman in India said in an e-mailed reply.The company would rigorously continue to defend its intellectual property rights, he said.An official at Natco Pharma said he had not seen the order.Bayer had challenged the Indian patents office's compulsory license order and the matter is pending with the Intellectual Property Appellate Board. The final judgement is expected to take a few more weeks.According the compulsory license order, Natco has to share 6 percent royalty on sales of generic Nexavar with Bayer. The German firm sells the kidney and liver cancer drug in India at Rs 280,000 for a month's dose."This decision once again affirms that governments can and should act in the interest of public health to bring the price of patented medicines down," said Leena Menghaney, a manager in New Delhi for Medecins Sans Frontieres, which relies on Indian-made generic drugs to treat AIDS and other diseases in Africa and many poor countries.India's $12-billion drug market is seen by major western drugmakers as a huge opportunity, but they are wary of the level of protection for intellectual property in a country where generic medicines account for more than 90 per cent of sales.(Reuters)advertise here
lundi 17 septembre 2012
Bayer's Plea For Stay On Generic Dismissed
An Indian patents appeals board on 14 September dismissed Bayer AG's petition seeking a stay on the "compulsory license" issued to Natco Pharma for selling generic copies of cancer drug Nexavar in India, a spokesman for the board said.The decision is a setback to the German drugmaker, which had sought to block the entry of Natco's generic version of Nexavar, which the Indian firm has been told to sell at Rs 8,800 for a monthly dose."The stay petition is dismissed but the main matter is pending," the spokesman told Reuters over the telephone from the southern city of Chennai on Monday."We are disappointed with the decision of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board to reject the stay petition on the compulsory license granted to Natco for Nexavar," a Bayer spokesman in India said in an e-mailed reply.The company would rigorously continue to defend its intellectual property rights, he said.An official at Natco Pharma said he had not seen the order.Bayer had challenged the Indian patents office's compulsory license order and the matter is pending with the Intellectual Property Appellate Board. The final judgement is expected to take a few more weeks.According the compulsory license order, Natco has to share 6 percent royalty on sales of generic Nexavar with Bayer. The German firm sells the kidney and liver cancer drug in India at Rs 280,000 for a month's dose."This decision once again affirms that governments can and should act in the interest of public health to bring the price of patented medicines down," said Leena Menghaney, a manager in New Delhi for Medecins Sans Frontieres, which relies on Indian-made generic drugs to treat AIDS and other diseases in Africa and many poor countries.India's $12-billion drug market is seen by major western drugmakers as a huge opportunity, but they are wary of the level of protection for intellectual property in a country where generic medicines account for more than 90 per cent of sales.(Reuters)iPhone 5 Pre-Orders Blow The Doors Off—But Is Apple Losing Its Edge?
iPhone 5 Pre-Orders Blow The Doors Off—But Is Apple Losing Its Edge?
By Henry Blodget | Daily Ticker – 4 hours ago
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/iphone-5-pre-orders-blow-doors-off-apple-150845757.html
Apple (AAPL) announced this morning that the first day's pre-orders for the company's new iPhone 5 are more than double the level of any previous iPhone launch.
Specifically, Apple said it sold more than 2 million iPhones in 24 hours.
That's spectacular.
And the iPhone 5 will obviously be a huge hit.
But the biggest manufacturer of smartphones worldwide, Samsung, countered Apple's news with its own this morning: Samsung plans to release its own next-generation smartphone, the Galaxy S4, in February. This release will follow the iPhone 5 by only 4 months, and Samsung will then presumably have 8 months in which to sell a phone that could represent a clear leapfrog of the iPhone 5.
A few years ago, when Apple rolled out a new version of the iPhone, it was generally considered to be a year ahead of the competition. Now, at least in the eyes of some product reviewers, that edge has been lost.
So are Apple's best days behind it? Is the company losing its edge?
No, says Jay Yarow, Senior Editor at Business Insider.
Apple's iPhone product pitch, Yarow says, has never been that the iPhone has better "specs" than competing phones. In fact, Apple has been behind in the "spec" game for years. Apple's pitch has been and will be that the iPhone is the best phone on the market. In Yarow's view, the iPhone 5 has easily cleared that hurdle.
As for what Samsung might release in February, Yarow thinks the "my-hardware's-better-than-yours" game is pretty much over. Each new phone release represents less of a leap over the prior version than the previous upgrade did. And by next year, Yarow thinks, the hardware upgrade game will have run its course.
Yarow thinks Apple's best days may behind it, but only because those days have been so mind-bogglingly spectacular. Apple has plenty of good days ahead, Yarow said. And they'll start with the amazing launch for the iPhone 5.
Occupy Wall Street: One Year Later
It's been one year since a motley mix of protestors first gathered in New York City's Zuccotti Park to express their outrage against a system they felt catered to the top 1% of folks on the economic ladder. And on this anniversary day, protests are happening again in cities across the U.S. and beyond, including its birthplace.
At its inception last September, scant attention was paid to the protesting few, a group that was in part dismissed as tie-dye wearing, weed-toking kids embracing a starry-eyed 1960s idealism that the age of cynicism should have wiped out.
But before you could say "We are the ninety-nine percent," the Occupy Wall Street movement gained enormous traction, attaining a stronger sense of legitimacy when major unions joined the protests in early October. OWS was already spreading rapidly to other states and countries with a message that encompassed everything from growing income disparity and the evils of corporate greed to the need for campaign finance reform and desire for universal health care. And then some.
It was the broad scope of the OWS message that became a key criticism of the movement, with many asking, "Where is the focus?" A typical day at Zuccotti Park back in the autumn of last year might include people with signs condemning Wall Street bigwigs and demanding higher taxes for the wealthy but also championing pro-choice sentiment and protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, dreadlocked kids may have been getting tattoos while swaying to throwback tunes from the likes of Neil Young, while folks at "Communist Manifesto" booths attempted to lure the unconverted and others sold OWS-themed T-shirts (capitalism at its best, although the irony may have been lost on the sellers).
A Fractured Message
Yes, in New York City and elsewhere the message was certainly a fractured one, but at least the movement sparked conversation and brought attention to issues that more than deserved it. But for all the understandable outrage, little seemed to emerge on how to solve the problems that OWS participants were railing against. They were mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore, but what were they going to do about it? What could be done about it?
Before long, the movement began to collapse in on itself amid the infighting and dirty politics that eventually seem to mark everything that begins and ends with an element that is essentially flawed: human beings. Again we were treated to the irony of a mass protest that became, in some ways, everything it was fighting against.
Monday's Yahoo! Finance poll gives a nod to the anniversary, asking the question "Where do you think the movement stands?" And it is not surprising that 81% of respondents so far say the movement "never made a real impact," while 11% say the movement was "significant, but missed its moment" and only 8% believe OWS is "still raising important questions."
But although the camping residents of Zuccotti Park are long gone, there is still a little spirit left in the ol' movement yet. Crowds of protestors -- albeit much smaller ones than last year, numbering in the hundreds in New York City instead of the thousands -- are hitting the streets Monday to remind people they are still here and that the issues they have demonstrated against are still very much alivein yet another rancorous election year. The police presence in New York City has been strong, the arrests have been plentiful and the day is unlikely to end with an OWS message that is any more concise than it was at the very beginning. But on a much smaller scale, the conversation continues.
Click here for a slideshow of images from today's protest in New York.
Lawsuit between Google, authors in U.S. suspended pending appeal
Lawsuit between Google, authors in U.S. suspended pending appeal
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - An appeals court judge on Monday suspended trial court litigation involving Google Inc and thousands of authors pending appeal by the search engine giant of an order granting the authors class-action status.
A one-sentence order by a 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judgein New York said the Authors Guild, which sued Google seven years ago over the company's plans to create the world's largest digital books library, consented to the suspension.
In a case where billions of dollars are at stake, the appeals court has given Google permission to challenge a May 31 decision by a judge letting authors sue as a group rather than individually. The appeals court has not yet scheduled oral arguments for the appeal.
In March 2001, Judge Denny Chin rejected a $125 million settlement of the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, saying it gave Google too much power to copy books en masse without permission from authors.
The cases are Authors Guild et al v Google Inc in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 05-08136 and in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 12-2402.
(Reporting By Grant McCool; Editing by Kenneth Barry)
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