The collapse of the drug companies' court case against the South African government is likely to prove just a gambit in the battle for cheaper medicines in developing countries.
While the spotlight shines on the government in Pretoria, which has not yet shown any inclination to use the anti-AIDS drugs which it can now legally obtain at lower prices, a second legal front has already opened up in Brazil, a country hailed as a shining example of what is possible in the treatment of AIDS in the developing world.
Brazil is richer than South Africa and has half-a-million fewer HIV-positive patients, but that does not diminish its achievement in distributing life-saving anti-retroviral drugs to the vast majority of patients who need them.
Brazil has achieved success by making cheap generic copies of some drugs available in the West and buying others from generic manufacturers in India. Since 1996, when it began to provide free anti-retroviral drugs, Brazil has halved the death rate through AIDS and cut the number of those confined to hospital by 80 per cent.
But now Brazil is coming under serious attack. Washington, at the behest of the pharmaceutical companies, is taking Brazil to a disciplinary tribunal of the World Trade Organisation. The US alleges that Brazil is in breach of the world body's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement which enshrines patent protection for 20 years. If the WTO rules against Brazil, it will be forced to change its laws and weaken its ability to obtain cheap medicines, or face trade sanctions.
"We are very concerned about the Brazilian case," says Michael Bailey, senior policy adviser at Oxfam which is campaigning for access to cheap medicines. "It is also a litmus test for the US government's intentions."
Brazil has so far manufactured or imported 10 types of drugs quite legally, because the medicines were patented before Brazil's TRIPS-compliant laws came into force in 1997. But the country now faces a battle against the drug companies, backed by Washington, over drugs which have been patented since.
The action lodged by the US at the WTO in January takes issue with article 68 of Brazil's 1996 Industrial Property Act, which states that Brazil can legally make or import a generic version of a drug if the patent-holding company fails to manufacture it in Brazil - local production making it cheaper - within three years.
In practice, the clause has never been called upon. But campaigners claim that as with the South African court case, the drug firms and their allies are targeting local laws to intimidate poorer countries into buying drugs at prices set by the big companies.
"It is part of the systematic intimidation of Brazil and developing countries to say if you step out of what we define as the line on intellectual property, we will clobber you in the courts," says Mr Bailey. "For most developing countries it is pretty tough to fight a WTO case." Developing nations are scheduled to sign up to TRIPS by 2005. After that, poorer countries fear that the drug companies and their lawyers will be able to set high prices virtually unchallenged.
Oxfam sees the case against Brazil as a clear signal to countries such as Argentina and India, both of which manufacture generic medicines and both of which are currently preparing their own TRIPS-compliant legislation.
Brazil has recently won a battle with Merck, manufacturers of Stocrin, its brand name product of the generic drug efavirenz, one of the two patented drugs on which Brazil spends a third of its AIDS drugs budget. The state-owned pharmaceutical firm, Farmanguinos, imported some efavirenz produced in India, saying it wanted to research the possibility of making its own copy.
Although Merck threatened legal action, it has now reduced the price of Stocrin by more than half. Brazil is trying the same tactics with Roche, manufacturers of Viracept, the brand-name product of the generic drug nelfinavir.
Despite the publicity disaster wrought by the court case in Pretoria, the US will be reluctant to back down over its WTO litigation. Brazil, after all, is in its back yard and the nightmare scenario for the pharmaceutical giants is the possibility of cheap generic versions of their latest drugs ending up in the United States.