Economic Justification of Patents and Exceptions to Patentability

The present article is the conclusion of a review of economic justifications for patent rights conducted with the objective of determining whether such arguments are per se capable of sustaining the existence of a different patentability regime for inventions of methods for treatment and diagnostic methods (art.53 (c) European Patent Convention). It starts by exploring the normative background and summarily describes the different types of claims allowed under the current legal framework and their differences. The following sections will describe and apply the main economic arguments sustaining patent rights inventions of methods for treatment and diagnostic methods. These reasoning will be later confronted with contra-arguments. This piece will finalize with the formulation of conclusions extracted from the previous debate, inter-alia that economic reasoning does not per se sustain the existence of the so-called 'medical exception' in European patent law.