Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Rights and the Single Market

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Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject Law - European and International Law, Intellectual Properties, grade: 13, 53 (gut) , Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, course: Magister Juris Internationalis, language: English, abstract: With an aging demographic all over the European Union, the European pharmaceutical sector is set to grow in the coming decades. Al-ready today the pharmaceutical industry is a key employer in Europe. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry is marked by a very ex-pensive research and development phase, which makes strong intellectual property rights crucial to ensure that research for new pharmaceuticals remains commercially interesting. But not only direct threats to intellectual property rights, such as the production of generic phar-maceuticals or the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals, pose a threat to those pharmaceutical companies which heavily invest in research for the development of new products: different prices for identical pharmaceuticals in different member states of the European Community make it economically interesting to buy pharmaceuticals in one member state and sell them abroad. It might even be cheaper to sell reimported pharmaceuticals in the country of origin. This possibility opens a whole new market for reimporters which cuts directly into the profit of the producers. In this thesis we will look at different issues surrounding intellectual property rights in the European pharmaceutical sector by investigating the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance.