Compulsory licensing in medicine: Is it a safeguard for the people or an evil to kill innovation?

Compulsory License is the scheme that a government allows someone else to produce the patented product (or a process) without consent of the patent owner. The conditions are stipulated by the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) and many countries including developed countries have some forms of compulsory license in their patent laws. Over the past decade, several developing countries have issued a compulsory license what they claimed “in order to secure access to medicine for their people”. Indonesia was one of them. Indonesia in 2012 issued a compulsory license against seven HIV/AIDS medicines. Unlike many other developing countries, Indonesia has a certain scale of pharmaceutical industry and holds three large state run pharmaceutical companies which have new drug developing function. In a wake of issuance of compulsory license in 2012, the government assigned one of the three state run pharmaceutical companies to develop these targeted medicine. This study is aimed at analyzing the meaning of compulsory license in medicine in developing countries, taking Indonesian compulsory license in 2012 as a case.