The anatomy of CUSMA’s patent: Does it still reflect an equipoise?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Protocol of Amendment to the Agreement between the United States of America, Canada and the United Mexican States erased many of the TRIPS-plus provisions inserted earlier into the Canada- United States of America-Mexico Agreement (hereafter, CUSMA) signed on 30 November 2018. While the erasure of the provisions shows the contributions made to promote access to medicines, the Agreement still retains TRIPS-plus provisions, including the provisions on patent term extensions. Thus seen, irrespective of the changes introduced by the Protocol of Amendment, patent term extensions may have a negative implication on access to cost-cutting medicines (biosimilars and generics). Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on patent term extensions, as contained in the CUSMA’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) chapter. The paper investigates if & how the patent term extension has the potential to impede access to affordable medicines (biologics and chemically synthesized medicines). In so doing, the paper provides possible responses to the question, do the provisions on patent term extensions hinder the timely access to affordable medicines? As such, the first part of the paper succinctly looks at CUSMA. Section “Patent protection under the TRIPS agreement” examines the TRIPS patent regime. While “The CUSMA’s rules on patent term extension” section discusses the nature of obligations included in the CUSMA’s IPRs chapter, the Section “The CUSMA’s rules on patent term extension vis-à-vis access to medicines” analyzes the potential implications of patent term extensions on access to affordable medicines. The final section concludes the paper.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".