US presidential election: what the contenders are saying about IP
Hillary Clinton (Democrat)
Hillary Clinton, now in her second presidential election campaign, is planning on using intellectual property to get companies to pay their taxes.
In January 2016, while campaigning in Sioux City in Iowa, an audience member asked: “We have major corporations in this country—General Electric, Apple, many others—that are salting money away offshore. Can’t we use their patents as leverage to make them pay their taxes?”
According to news publication The Hill, Clinton replied: “Yes, we can, and we will.”
She added: “American companies have, I think, a couple of trillion dollars stashed overseas. Technically it’s on their books but they park it somewhere because they don’t want to pay their taxes.
“I think we’ve got to reform our whole tax code because the way it’s working now, it is driving companies away, it’s driving companies to engage in these gimmicky tax games that they are playing.”
She also plans to unleash small business growth by encouraging innovation—targeting companies “like Etsy and eBay” that are unlocking new business through new platforms that allow them to sell nationally and internationally.
Clinton spoke in New Hampshire in April 2015 about the issue, saying: “I want to be sure we get small businesses starting and growing in America again.
We have stalled out. I was very surprised to see that when I began to dig into it.”
Donald Trump (Republican)
Donald Trump has dominated headlines over the world for his policies in this campaign and is a surprise contender for the Republican nomination.
On the campaign trail this year, he took part in a Republican debate in February in New Hampshire, where he discussed the government power known as eminent domain with Jeb Bush.
The definition of eminent domain is “the power to take private property for public use by a state, municipality, or private person or corporation authorised to exercise functions of public character, following the payment of just compensation to the owner of that property”.
IP blog IP Watchdog published an article about eminent domain, saying Trump “bragged” that if “one is smart” he or she can profit from eminent domain.
The blog said it is unclear “whether patent owners see the world through the same rose-coloured glasses when it comes to the usurpation of exclusive rights”. It went on to say that “infringers take patent property”, questioning whether “Trump’s view of the use of eminent domain to strip real property rights from property owners should be a red flag for IP owners” and whether he is simply advocating taking away these rights for “private sector commercial gain”.
Another IP policy for Trump is to reform the US-China trade relationship in order to “make America great again”.
On his campaign website, he says that he wants to “protect American ingenuity and investment by forcing China to uphold intellectual property laws and stop their unfair and unlawful practice of forcing US companies to share proprietary technology with Chinese competitors as a condition of entry to China’s market”.
According to Trump, China’s IP theft costs “the US over $300 billion and millions of jobs each year”, and he claims that the “Chinese government ignores this rampant cybercrime and, in other cases, actively encourages or even sponsors it—without any real consequences”.
He wants to enforce stronger protections against “Chinese hackers and counterfeit goods, and our responses to Chinese theft will be swift, robust, and unequivocal”.
Bernie Sanders (Democrat)
“Americans pay, by far, the highest prices for prescription drugs in the entire world,” Bernie Sanders said on his website and he has been arguing for drug prices to be lowered in the country.
Our sister publication, Life Sciences IP Review, published a story on March 30 which documented Sanders urging the US government to hold a hearing to determine whether a patent covering a prostate cancer drug should be licensed in a bid to lower its price.
The price of Xtandi (enzalutamide), marketed by Astellas Pharma, is too high, according to a letter co-written by Sanders on March 28.
The drug, according to the letter, costs $129,000 in the US but is sold in Japan and Sweden for $39,000 and Canada for $30,000.
Sanders, along with several other Democratic senators, urged the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to hold a public meeting on the issue.
The patent covering the drug could be overridden because the drug was developed by the University of California with the help of taxpayers’ money before it was licensed to Medivation, a biotechnology company that agreed to market the drug for Astellas.
“When Americans pay for research that results in a safe and effective drug, an unreasonably high cost should not limit their access to it. New treatments are meaningless if patients cannot afford them,” the letter said.
It added: “We think that a public hearing is important to allow the public to engage in a dialogue with the Department of Health and Human Services and NIH in order to better understand its position on the use of ‘march-in’ [rights] to address excessive prices.”
Next steps
The final vote has yet to be cast, but judging by the media reports around this presidential election, the eventual victor will have some big challenges ahead.
