A group of lawmakers wants the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and drug companies to change their approach toward handling mistakes in disclosing patent terms, because the errors can be exploited in ways that thwart competition and, ultimately, raise the cost of medicines.
The problem cited by the lawmakers concerns the way that administrative delays are handled at the PTO. Sometimes, a delay is caused by a patent review, so the PTO will compensate a pharmaceutical company by extending the life of the patent by the number of days caused by the delay. Conversely, if a company was slow to respond to requests, the time is subtracted from the patent life.
The process for handling delays is called a patent term adjustment. The process was created as part of a federal law called the American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 and was seen as a way to compensate patent applicants when the PTO failed to act on applications within specified time limits. And to get it right, the PTO relies on automated software.
