Chavez may end patents on medicine in Venezuela

[Naveed Yaseen]

CARACAS (June 22 2009): President Hugo Chavez has vowed to shake up the rules governing intellectual property rights on medicines and other products in Venezuela, the socialist's latest move against the private sector. "A song is intellectual property, but an invention or a scientific discovery should be knowledge for the world, especially medicine," Chavez said late on Saturday.

"That a laboratory does not allow us to make a medicine because they have the patent, no, no, no," Chavez said. Chavez, who has nationalised many Venezuela industries and is critical of the private sector, ordered his trade minister to analyse the patent rules in the OPEC nation. "Patents have become a barrier to production, and we cannot allow them to be barriers to medicine, to life, to agriculture," said the minister, Eduardo Saman, who previously headed Venezuela's patent agency. "We are revising all the doctrines and laws related to patents, which should be compatible with the international treaties that we have signed and respect and honour."

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