Tutela della salute e proprietà intellettuale: due diritti in conflitto

Abstract

The impact of patents on access to medicine is a topic brutally concrete in Developing Countries. The difficulties of access to cares are due to the combination of several factors: the low income levels, the weakness of effective health systems and especially the prices of medicines too often unsustainable. The majority of essential drugs is subjected to patents for a period of twenty years that guarantee a monopoly on the product as well as on a specific production process. The Multinational Companies resort at the patent and they do that only where there is a massive potential market and potential expansion. Consequently, there is the ban of production, use and trade of equivalent products, except upon the purchase or the issuance of an authorization of the patent holder. Right to health, right to health care, protection of private economic initiative: these are the legal and moral values that are addressed in the text following the theories of J. Stiglitz, the ambitious project of A. Sen to provide the conceptual tools for increase the justice through the instrument of impartiality and through a different definition of proximity and, at the end, the proposal of Health Impact Found belonging to T. Pogge, understood as a different model of approach to experimentation and its income that, without requiring charitable acts, would offer an opportunity also for handsome profits to research centers.