bolt & Guaranteed Sceptic,
I was relieved to hear that I was wrong - the US patent expirations are each 3 years earlier than I had thought - 2010 for '287 & '151; 2018 for the '414. Possibly this is because the US patent system granted 17 years, not the current 20 years at the time they were issued. Whatever the reason, I'll take it.
Anyway, I was also pleasantly confused to hear that the 15% and 20% royalties, according to the Insmed conference call, ONLY apply to PAST SALES. The whole PAST SALES issue is mystifying to me. Reading the actual court verdict there is no indication at all of past vs. future. It looked as if the royalties simply applied irrespective of past vs. future. It seems illogical and silly that the jury bothered to structure 2 different royalty rates (and probably burned up a lot of deliberation time doing so) covering a supposed total of $200 million in sales when everyone knew that iPlex was a recently approved orphan drug with less than $1 million in "PAST SALES" at most.
Why would they do that? It just does not make sense to me. Does everyone on this board truly believe that NO SALES AFTER Dec 6 2006 are covered by the royalty damages awarded by the jury?
The other claim by Dr Allan on the conference call was that all FUTURE SALES royalties payable to Tercica/DNA are yet to be decided by Judge Wilkens. I thought that the only 3 issues left for the judge were:
1- Willful infringement damages;
2- Injunction; and
3- Inequitable conduct issue.
Oh well, they fooled me again.
If it is true that only PAST SALES are effected by the jury-awarded royalty scheme, Insmed would actually have to pay only 15% of $1 million PAST SALES ($150,000), plus $7.5 million up-front penalty; plus another "willful infringement" penalty yet to be decided.
If the whole PAST SALES limitation on the jury verdict is true, and Wilkens does not come down too hard with additional royalties or lump-sum penalties, then this whole trial for Insmed amounts to not much, and DNA/Tercica will have gotten relatively little for all their bluster.
This is really a bizarre situation, and we have apparently not yet heard from the court on the decisions that really matter!
iPlex will outlive all of us - I'm invested in Insmed because this is fundamentally a very valuable hormone-replacement drug with multiple big uses & huge revenues coming in future years.
If Insmed doesn't survive to be the maker & marketer, someone else will, and longs will recover a good-to-excellent ROI no matter who is running the program. But it will obviously take 2-3 years for that to start happening.
This would be better than any soap opera if my $$ were not at stake. Which by the way they are, and will continue to be.
BTW I'm totally open to posters that may be able to clarify or correct any misunderstanding I have about the verdict. It's clear that logic is not a requirement for our legal system, so I won't be surprised if there are several things I'm missing here.
cheers
