Lawsuits
Well they say that Money Drives the World; but I would like to add a very minor change to it, i.e. Money Drives the World Crazy and even the civilized people start acting like they are from the Stone Age. This is what happened between the developers of Cialis, Lilly Icos and its competing brand Viagra’s developers Pfizer as they were leaving no stone unturned in efforts to pull each others leg.
They both Pfizer and Lilly Icos have filed many lawsuits against each other in various countries where both the brand were giving very stiff competition to each other and honestly speaking Pfizer got a little bit over the edge as Cialis was steadily chipping the market share of Viagra. Though this tug of war between the two giants; begun from the very start over the patent of PDE5 inhibitors, as both were working on the same thing and also developing it at the same time so this was natural but they really made a drama out of it soon the patent of one was about to over the other would jump for the exclusive rights for the patent ship. Pfizer was given a broad patent on PDE5 inhibitors in Britain in 1993. Lilly Icos filed a complaint in a London court in September 1999, and the patent was overturned in November 2000 on the grounds that Pfizer’s patent was based on information already in the public domain when the patent was issued. In the United States, Pfizer filed suit against Lilly Icos soon after receiving a broad US patent for PDE5 inhibitors in October 2002.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office ordered a reexamination of the patent, and, as in Britain, the examiner found that PDE5 inhibitors were not a new invention by Pfizer; voiding the patent, which literally surprised many and became a source of huge embarrassment for their tall claim about Sildenafil. In Canada, Pfizer moved to block sales of Cialis five months after it was approved there, arguing that there could be consumer backlash against Pfizer should Cialis be pulled from the market months later as a result of an ongoing patent lawsuit. A federal judge refused, saying he could not “imagine demonstrations in the street or storming of the barricades because one impotence medicine is made unavailable”.