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Biotech / Medical : WPI Watson Pharmaceuticals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark who wrote (58)	9/14/1999 12:23:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 61

Mark, We are approaching the $30 mark soon. The latest legal battle seems almost comical... cbs.marketwatch.com Nancy Lovre, a spokeswoman for SmithKline, said the company spent "considerable resources" developing behavioral support programs to accompany Nicorette. Lovre said the user guides and tapes were "intrinsically entwined" with the Nicorette product and that by reproducing them almost identically, Watson was "stealing creative intellectual property." In a letter to Watson April 16, 1998, the agency (FDA) said: "The text for your proposed audio is not the same as that for the reference listed drug, Nicorette... Please revise your tape text to be in accord with that of Nicorette." I haven't seen the literature that accompanies the Nicorette product, but I hardly see the information contained in an educational cassette as "creative intellectual property". Let's be adults here. What could be so earth shattering that it would constitute intellectual property and if it was IP was it patented? Why did the FDA ask Watson to mirror the content of the literature included with the Nicorette product? In any case, no pharmaceutical company worth their salt would ever consider marketing a smoking cessation product without some patient literature. A cassette or video or pamplet is the most common way of dispensing "behavioral support" in a box. I think the real issue is that the monies that States have been awarded from sucessful tobacco litigation will be spent freely on prevention and cessation. I can imagine that those with nicotine addictions will have resources/subsidies made freely available to them to purchase OTC cessation tools such as Nicorette. And Watson is seen as menace to this turf. I hope that the court sees the lunacy in all the arguments being made about "intellectual property". Seems like panic selling to me. I'm a buyer at these prices. Ausdauer