A legal action from activists against the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences on Wednesday is meant to not allow the company to bolster its coffer through unjustified patents for a hepatitis C medication that are believed to significantly increase the cost of the treatment for millions of patients worldwide.

Patent challenges against Gilead were announced by the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge (I-MAK), a legal advocacy group, in Argentina, Brazil, Russia and Ukraine. This is not the first time when a lawsuit has been filed against the company, as similar filings have already been made in India, Egypt and the European Union.

Priti Radhakrishnan, a co-founder of I-MAK, said in a conference call that Gilead has attempted to seek exclusive rights to sofosbuvir as a way to abuse patent laws by claiming the ownership of existing public knowledge. Sofosbuvir is branded by the company as Sovaldi.

According to Radhakrishnan, it is really unethical on Gilead’s part to claim the treatment as its own innovation when it is well-known that the previously published information and existing compounds led to the evolution of the drug.

International patent law requires a company to prove that a drug is novel, non-obvious and useful to get approval for rights to a treatment, said Tahir Amin, an I-MAK co-founder and the group’s director of intellectual property.

Dr. Jennifer Cohn, the access campaign medical director for Doctors Without Borders, said the set criteria to obtain rights to a drug is not being fulfilled by Gilead, thus it doesn’t deserve patents for sofosbuvir.

Cohn said that Gilead is under illusion that it’s new or innovative science that makes it eligible for a patent.

The treatment is 96% life saving, according to Dr. Rafael Ortega, director of treatment education program for New York-based National Aids Treatment Advocacy Project. But the drug is very expensive at $1,000 a pill.

“We didn't really say we want to charge $1,000 a pill. We're just looking at what we think was a fair price for the value that we're bringing into the health care system and to the patients”, said Gregg Alton, vice president at Gilead.