Some activists claim that companies file multiple patents for a single product to “game” the patent system. But there’s nothing insidious or abnormal about this practice.
High-tech products like smartphones and medicines routinely combine numerous inventions, each of which requires its own patent. For example, Apple filed around 200 patents for the first iPhone.
There are often many distinct and novel innovations that go into a single medicine. Patents can cover separate — yet equally important — characteristics of a drug such as its ingredients, method of administration, and dosage.
Deriding the patents the USPTO issues on such critically important inventions is to deride the inventions themselves.
Crucially, if an inventor files a patent for a variant of their product that would not qualify for its own standalone patent, the new patent is given the same expiration date as the product’s original patent. Otherwise, the patent for the new variant is denied.