In Germany, the country where the case heard by the European Court of Justice began with a complaint filed by Greenpeace against a Bonn University researcher, the press is divided on the issue. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung enthusiastically remarks that the ruling shows that “economic interests do not take precedence over everything,” while Süddeutsche Zeitung struggles to understand the decision. "Excessive moralising," headlines the Bavarian daily, which points out that the judges were less motivated by moral considerations when considering the patenting of "components for tanks, abortion pills and the results of animal testing.”

An aspirin, which costs 2 cents in the UK and 14 cents in the Czech Republic, costs 20 cents in Germany. Oral contraceptives like the Yasmin birth control pill, which is produced by the German drug company Bayer and exported to more than 100 countries worldwide, are so expensive that black marketeers who re-import them from Portugal are making a killing.

According to the OECD, on average Germans spend 20% more than the citizens of other developed countries on medicines. A lobbyist interviewed by the weekly explains that there are two reasons for this. One is the size of the country: Germany functions as a reference market for other countries where prices are often lower. It follows that the cost of drugs in Germany is a critical issue for the pharmaceutical companies.

The second is deregulation: the laboratories are "free to set prices and charge what they want to insurance companies," explains Die Zeit. Procedures for the autorisation and distribution of new pharmaceuticals are also much faster and easier to implement in Germany. Elsewhere in Europe, "only Malta and Denmark offer such preferential conditions to producers."