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Audrey A Millemann

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Audrey Millemann is a shareholder with Weintraub Tobin and practices in the Intellectual Property and Litigation sections. She is a litigator and a registered patent attorney.  Audrey advises clients on all issues of intellectual property law, including infringement, validity, and ownership of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.

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I recently wrote about the patent infringement lawsuit filed by Moderna against Pfizer/BioNTech over the COVID-19 vaccine. In its complaint filed in federal district court in Boston last August, Moderna alleged that Pfizer/BioNTech infringed three of Moderna’s patents in developing the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna seeks damages only for the time period after March 8, 2022, when Moderna announced that it would begin to enforce its patents after holding off doing so for 15 months while the pandemic was raging. The amount of money at stake is high. Pfizer/BioNTech sold over $26.4 billion of the vaccine in the first nine months of 2022; Moderna sold over $13.5 billion of its vaccine during the same time.…

Continue Reading The Battle Over the COVID-19 Vaccine Continues

One of the most amazing accomplishments in the field of biotechnology has been the development and distribution of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 (COVID 19). The numbers tell the story.

The time from when the coronavirus’ RNA sequence, identified by China, was published on January 11, 2020 to the date that clinical trials in the U.S. began in March 2020 was 66 days. From the date the RNA sequence was published to the date that a vaccine was first administered to the public, on December 11, 2020, was 11 months. Within a year of the date the RNA sequence was published, both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech were providing thousands of doses of mRNA vaccines to people around the world. The mRNA vaccines were extremely effective – they provided about 94-95% protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death. These vaccines are now available to anyone over the age of six months. In the world’s wealthiest countries, and in much of the rest of the world, vaccine availability is no longer a factor getting vaccinated.
Continue Reading From Saving the World to Fighting Over IP: Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech

In the last few years, the U.S. Copyright Office refused to allow a copyright registration for a work of art created by a machine, and a federal district court held that an artificial intelligence system could not be an inventor on a patent. However, before we decide whether an AI machine can have property rights, we will need to resolve a far more difficult question. Should AI machines have basic rights? This question requires consideration of ethical concepts, scientific knowledge, and legal issues. We cannot answer this question now because we do not have enough information.
Continue Reading Should AI Machines Have Rights?