Major Issues in Trade Secret Law

I was thrilled to attend The New Era of Trade Secret Law: The DTSA and other Developments, hosted by the IP Institute at Mitchell/Hamline School of Law and its Director, Sharon Sandeen, Robins Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Law.  The conference featured presentations by esteemed scholars of trade secret law discussing works in progress regarding trade secret law in the wake of federalization. In this post and in a subsequent post, I will provide brief summaries of some of these fascinating and important works in progress and what they say about the new federal trade secret law.

Biosimilars at the Supreme Court: Argument Preview

This is a guest post by Katie Mladinich, a J.D. student at Stanford Law School. She received her Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments this morning in its first cases involving the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA), Amgen v. Sandoz and Sandoz v. Amgen. Passed as part of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the BPCIA was intended to create an FDA approval pathway for generic versions of complex biologic drugs, biosimilars, much as the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act has facilitated generic approvals for small-molecule drugs. The BPCIA was a hard-fought legislative compromise between those favoring stronger incentives for biologic pioneers and those seeking to rein in spiraling healthcare costs with more affordable generic drugs. The statute resolved a number of key issues, such as setting a twelve-year data exclusivity period before a biosimilar may be approved, but the policy battle over many smaller details has now moved to the courts. Amgen filed suit against Sandoz for seeking approval of a biosimilar of Amgen’s filgrastim drug, Neupogen, based on two sections of the BPCIA. Amgen claims (1) that Sandoz failed to provide Amgen a copy of its abbreviated Biologics License Application (aBLA) as required to begin the BPCIA “patent dance” under § 262(l)(2)(A), and (2) that Sandoz did not grant Amgen the required 180-day notice of commercial marketing by providing notice prior to FDA approval as required by § 262(l)(8)(A). The Northern District of California ruled in Sandoz’s favor on both issues, but the Federal Circuit overturned the district court on the second issue—while quoting Churchill in describing the statute as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The Supreme Court is now faced with unraveling this riddle.

Yelderman on Accuracy in the Patent System

When the USPTO is faced with a patent application of uncertain validity, which way should it err? How do the costs of erroneous patent grants compare with the costs of erroneous patent denials? Steve Yelderman provides an insightful new take on these questions in The Value of Accuracy in the Patent System (forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review). In short, he concludes that erroneous patent grants are more harmful than previously assumed, but only when "the unsatisfied patentability requirement is one that seeks to influence a mutually exclusive choice"—i.e., whether it incentivizes invention over non-invention, disclosure over non-disclosure, licensing over reinvention, etc.

Under the conventional account, if one assumes that the legal criteria of patentability are set correctly (an important caveat!), then social welfare is maximized by awarding patents to patentable inventions (true positives) and denying patents to unpatentable inventions (true negatives). Erroneous denials (false negatives) create a cost of decreased ex ante incentives for other inventors (I_FN), while erroneous grants (false positives) and correct grants create ex post costs like deadweight loss (C). If the probability that a given application is patentable is q, then it should only be granted at the threshold q > C/I_FN. (Note that it doesn't matter whether I_FN is included as a cost for false negatives or a benefit for true positives; you get to the same result.) If the ex post costs of patents are low relative to their incentive benefits, they should be granted even for inventions that are unlikely to meet patentability standards, and as the relative weight of these factors reverses, patents should only be awarded when it seems quite likely that they are deserved.

Yelderman's key insight is that this analysis ignores another important cost of erroneous grants: false positives also reduce ex ante incentives because they often narrow the expected difference between inventing and not inventing. This framework can be illustrated as follows, with I_FP shown in blue: