Last fall, the European Commission fined Teva €462.6 million for allegedly artificially extending the latter’s exclusivity in the market for glatiramer acetate medicines by, inter alia, obtaining a series of divisional patents covering methods of manufacture, threatening to enforce these patents by means of preliminary injunctions, and then timely withdrawing its requests for preliminary injunctions to avoid judgments of invalidity. See European Commission, Press Release: Commission fines Teva €462.6 million over misuse of the patent system and disparagement to delay rival multiple sclerosis medicine (Oct. 30, 2024), https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_5581 (noting, in addition, that the case also involved an alleged campaign of disparagement of a rival’s generic product, and stating that these “abuses were complementary and together amounted to a single and continuous infringement of Article 102”); Summary of Commission Decision of Oct. 31, 2024 relating to a proceeding under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (Case AT.40588—Teva Copaxone), https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases1/202504/AT_40588_10456072_6275_5.pdf. Last week, the Commission made available to the public a "provisional non-confidential version" of its 565-page decision. Here it is. I am not very far along in reading it yet, but I will be discussing it in my forthcoming book Wrongful Patent Assertion: A Comparative Law and Economics Analysis. The part about about the misuse of divisional patents runs from pages 226-339.
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