Gileads lawyers moved the Delhi High Court against this decision. That decision was overturned on appeal in February 2015. In the meantime, it granted Indian companies voluntary licenses (VLs), which allowed them to make and sell in a selected few countries at a discounted price. This agreement also granted 7% of the royalties to Gilead. However, the list of countries open to Indian firms under this agreement excluded 73 million people with hepatitis C.

Developing world
In 2014, Gilead announced it would seek generic licensing agreements with manufacturers to produce sofosbuvir in 91 developing countries, which contained 54% of the worlds HCV-infected population. Gilead also said it would sell a name brand version of the product in India for $300 per course of treatment, approximately double a third party estimate of the minimum achievable cost of manufacture. It had signed licenses with generic manufacturers by September 2015. The leader of one Indian activist group called this move inadequate, but nine companies launched products, which "unleashed a fierce marketing war", according to Indias The Economic Times.In Egypt, which had the worlds highest incidence of hepatitis C, Gilead offered sofosbuvir at the discounted price of $900 to the Egyptian government. The government in turn made it free to patients. Later, Gilead licensed a generic version to be available in Egypt.The Access to Medicine Index ranked Gilead first among the worlds 20 largest pharmaceutical countries in the Pricing, Manufacturing and Distribution category in both 2013 and 2014, citing Gileads "leading performance in equitable pricing."
In contrast, Jennifer Cohn of Doctors Without Borders and the organization Doctors of the World criticized the price of sofosbuvir as reflecting "corporate greed" and ignoring the needs of people in developing countries.In Algeria, as of 2011 about 70,000 people were infected with hepatitis C. As of August 2015, Gilead had licensed its partners in India to sell sofosbuvir in Algeria. It had been criticized for not making the drug available in middle-income countries including Algeria prior to that. Controversies
The price has generated considerable controversy. In 2017, the range of costs per treatment varied from about $84,000 to about $50. Patent challenges
In February 2015, it was reported that Doctors of the World had submitted an objection to Gileads patent at the European Patent Office, claiming that the structure of sofosbuvir is based on already known molecules. In particular, Doctors of the World argued that the Protide technology powering sofosbuvir was previously invented by the Chris McGuigan team at Cardiff University in the UK, and that the Gilead drug is not therefore inventive. The group filed challenges in other developing countries as well. These challenges were unsuccessful and the court recognized the innovative step in pro-drug design and application to the specific example of sofosbuvir. Medical tourism
Due to the high cost of sofosbuvir in the U.S., as of 2016 increasing numbers of Americans with hepatitis C were traveling to India to purchase the drug.