India Hits Back in 'Bio-Piracy' Battle

papvf writes "The BBC News Online has an interesting story about a project to put traditional medical knowledge online. From the article: 'The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopedia of the country's traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.'"

Comments

Piracy Made Easy?

[biocute]

If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.

Now that they put everything online, accessible by anyone anywhere, wouldn't that make piracy easier?

Imagine a japanese doctor takes a recipe there, adds a bit of japanese herbs and claims it her own? She still won't stand long in the court, but now the enforceability is further weakened because they are so far away and have a different jurisdiction.

I'm not saying that people in/outside India cannot do that now, but imagine the ease of pirating a music CD compared to music cassette. I hope they're not making the piracy too easy even for the most casual pirates.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.

You haven't had much experience with court cases involving big companies, have you? 5 years later MAYBE it'll get thrown out, if the other side can afford to keep paying that long.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.

They don't have to "stand long in court" all they have to do is convince suckers that paying them $50k for a license is cheaper than paying $500k to duke it out in court and have the patent revoked.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[anonicon]

If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

Now that they put everything online, accessible by anyone anywhere, wouldn't that make piracy easier?

No, because making something easily available and free to use can't be pirated.

Imagine a japanese doctor takes a recipe there, adds a bit of japanese herbs and claims it her own? She still won't stand long in the court, but now the enforceability is further weakened because they are so far away and have a different jurisdiction.

Um, the japanese doctor can already do this. By making their knowledge publicly available, the Indian government is helping to make it less likely that someone else can abuse their particular knowledge base by patenting it.

I'm not saying that people in/outside India cannot do that now, but imagine the ease of pirating a music CD compared to music cassette.

That is a complete non-sequitir and a terrible, invalid analogy.

I hope they're not making the piracy too easy even for the most casual pirates.

There's more to life than pirates, such as the 6+ billion people in the world who are *not* pirates. I believe making this knowledge widely available will help a great deal more than it might hypothetically hurt.

Chuck

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Spy der Mann]

Imagine a japanese doctor takes a recipe there, adds a bit of japanese herbs and claims it her own?

the recipe IS her own in this case. Who knows what side effects will the japanese herbs will have on the traditional recipe.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[das_cookie]

If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.

From TFA:

"Under normal circumstances, a patent application should always be rejected if there is prior existing knowledge about the product."

"But in most of the developed nations like United States, "prior existing knowledge" is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database - not if it has been passed down through generations of oral and folk traditions."

Examples are given in the article about just how long it can "stand in the court". Court battles are rarely short, and even more rarely inexpensive.

Now that they put everything online, accessible by anyone anywhere, wouldn't that make piracy easier?

If you had bothered to read and comprehend TFA, you would realize that they are trying to put these remedies IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.

From TFA:

"When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions. Till now, we have not done the needful to protect our traditional wealth," says Ajay Dua, a senior bureaucrat in the federal commerce ministry.

Sheesh.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[mrokkam]

The main reason why the Indian government wants to make it a publicly known document is because there have been many cases where products like basmati (long grained rice from India and Pakistan), turmeric (used as an antiseptic in ayurvedic medicine), the neem tree (used for anything from disinfectant to toothbrush to itch reliever for chicken pox), bitter gourd(excellent for treatment of diabetes) etc. It took 10 years to revoke the patent on Turmeric (from the BBC website). I don't think anyone wants to go through that kind of litigation without having some strong proof of prior art.

Suppose some Indian company wants to export these products to the US at some later stage, or the patent laws allow for greater integration with worldwide patents (it's not probable... but anything's possible right?), then the patents issued would cause problems for them at that stage. It is this that the Indian government wants to avoid by creating a searchable digital archive with proof of prior art.
-Mohan

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Ullric]

piracy is something that been blow way out of proportion by the media.so,stop thinking about fuckin money and see the benifits of this.get the piracy thing out of your head.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Vicissidude]

First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine. Ancient people in Europe knew that chewing willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. In fact, the salicylic acid from willow bark was orginally used to synthesize aspirin. But, there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet. This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.

Even if I were convinced by that line of argument, just because India said they found some discovery first doesn't mean they actually did. Frankly, I find it more than just a little unbelievable that, as stated in the article, 80% of the US patents issued over medical plants up until 2000 were plants of Indian origin. India is not the only country around with ancient folk medicine.

What we do know is that India copies our pharmaceuticals just like they copy everything else. They pay no royalties to the companies that did the original research. They then sell these generic pharmaceuticals to other third world countries at prices far under the cost of the research, which our companies still need to recoup through sales.

In other words, India wants to justify the theft of our intellectual property by saying, "nyah, nyah, we found the plant first", whether they actually did or not. The logic is flawed anyway considering that finding the plant may or may not have ultimately been used in the final drug. We certainly don't go peeling the bark off of trees to make aspirin any more.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[whitehatlurker]

TFA saith:

And lo, in the year 1995 did the United States Patent Office again ignore the art that hath gone before and grantest the patent on tumeric. And those long two years did the people of India fight the just fight and bring the USPO to the recognition of its ill behaviour and have USPO revokest this ill patent.

And yet dist the patent office of Europe grant a patent on a product based on neem, of common knowledge in India, and for 10 years did resist the calls for sanity before purging the patent.

And in the year 1998 didst the USPO again fall on its head and granted a patent on Basmati rice. Four years of arduous labours did it take before the USPO did see reason and revokest this imbicility.

And thus was it wrote, and thus was it ignored by the slashdaughters, and the article persisted on the internet.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What we do know is that India copies our pharmaceuticals just like they copy everything else. They pay no royalties to the companies that did the original research. They then sell these generic pharmaceuticals to other third world countries at prices far under the cost of the research, which our companies still need to recoup through sales"

To that I say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander"

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Stonehand]

It seems to be that if the method of transforming some herbal-based traditional remedy into a more standard medication with, say, controlled dosages and purity standards and all that -- if the specifics of this method happen to be non-obvious and new, that this process would still be patentable.

It wouldn't be useful for stopping people from using the underlying traditional remedy, but it'd be useful for stopping competing concerns from doing their own packaging and distribution (at least using that specific method).

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't even make sense.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Vicissidude]

Knowing to use willow bark to reduce fever and inflammation doesn't give you the knowledge to make aspirin.

Further, who would you compensate for the original knowledge regarding willow bark? That was common knowledge in Europe, so maybe all the European countries? Oh wait, here comes China and they claim they knew about it first. No, you can't create a workable system like that.

The knowledge to turn the plant into a medicine that comes in a nice, white pill in a bottle with a specific dosage of the active ingredient is itself worthy of a patent. All this folk knowledge, whether prior art or not, doesn't change that fact.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wheat being in the "public domain" doesn't stop bakers from making bread. It just stops them from selling it for $50 a loaf and suing anyone else who makes bread. Oh, and this will astound you: Wheat is found all over the world, even in India.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Lehk228]

HOWEVER if you patent using willow bark to make a pill for headache then I couldn't sell a pill made from willow bark even if the process of converting it into a medically reliable pill i use is entirely different.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Stonehand]

But you *can't* patent "using willow bark to make a pill for headache".

Claims have to include methods, not just applications. That means that the specific process of turning the bark into a pill must be spelled out to the degree that somebody can actually implement it. A different process will not infringe even if it shares the same objective.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[mabinogi]

> Further, who would you compensate for the original knowledge regarding willow bark?
No one! that's the whole point. The idea is to make sure that it's very easy for someone to discover that this is widely known traditional knowledge, so that a company can't pass it off as their own invention.

BTW - you picked the willow bark example - what you say about that is true in itself, but it remains to be seen how much relevance it actually has to the matter at hand.
It is quite likely that there are plenty of cases where the traditional process for extracting the appropriate chemicals from a plant are near exactly the same as the steps used in commercial production. Obviously they're not necesarily going to include the turning in to a powder and putting in a capsule part, but then that part of the process is almost certain to already be patented anyway, as it is common across a wide range of medicines.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Tim C]

First off, there is a lot of work that goes into turning medicinal plants into actual medicine... there is a lot of work that goes into turning bark into little white capsules you keep in a bottle in your cabinet.

Fine, so grant a patent on the process of turning the bark into the little white pills. Do not grant patents on chewing the bark, or on growing the damn trees the bark comes from. (If someone else figures out a different way of going from bark to pills, that should be fair game too)

This article seems to ignore that work in chemistry and biology and instead argue for the people who figured out that chewing bark worked in the first place.

No bark-chewers, no little white pills. Sure, figuring out how to make little white pills out of bark takes time and effort, but without the people chewing the bark in the first place, no-one would have even thought to try. So let the corporations own the rights to making the pills, but don't try to take away the right to use the bark in other ways to help ease a person's symptons.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[mrokkam]

Well, patenting a process wouldn't really cut it. I could make the exact same pill using a different process. That's the way the patent system in India works and that's not really that workable as many medical companies have found out to their disadvantage. What IS patentable (AFAIK) is a particular molecule or substance that you identified in .. say... the willow bark. Which is where the whole problem starts.

-Mohan

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Vicissidude]

So let the corporations own the rights to making the pills, but don't try to take away the right to use the bark in other ways to help ease a person's symptons.

Fine with me... I haven't argued otherwise. I'm not even sure why you're bringing this up.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[The Cydonian]

In other words, India wants to justify the theft of our intellectual property by saying, "nyah, nyah, we found the plant first", whether they actually did or not. The logic is flawed anyway considering that finding the plant may or may not have ultimately been used in the final drug. We certainly don't go peeling the bark off of trees to make aspirin any more.

I don't think anyone's concerned about making new drugs from medicinal plants, but are more concerned about ensuring existing Ayurvedic/Unani/Siddha/etc medicines aren't patented as if they we were new. Like most other ancient civilisations, we've had systemised forms of medicine that we should be free to practise without the need for paying royalties to anyone. Note that the article doesn't talk about barks or anything, but actual, fully-developed remedies, so it's much more than merely a list of medicinal plants as you seem to believe it is.

In short, with completely inane patents on turmeric, it is you who are "stealing" intellectual property from us.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to be that if the method of transforming some herbal-based traditional remedy into a more standard medication with, say, controlled dosages and purity standards and all that -- if the specifics of this method happen to be non-obvious and new, that this process would still be patentable.

I dont think so as the patent would stop the non-controlled-dosage one too. But the method for controlling the dosage can be patented and probably is.

Information is great and all, but

[bobertfishbone]

After a while, doesn't making everything free kind of destroy the incentive for all but the most altrustic knowledge-seekers?

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't making anything free, they are just making information that already is free easier to access and they do this to prevent someone else making this information non-free.

So what's the point of your post or did you just want to start a flamewar?

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Petersko]

After a while, doesn't making everything free kind of destroy the incentive for all but the most altrustic knowledge-seekers?

I must have said this a hundred times before, but usually nobody replies.

Usually I'm taking about why sharing music files IS theft, which naturally changes EVERYTHING for some reason I can't fully understand.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Anonymous Coward]

No, rather it makes the execution and support of free ideas what is worth paying for, rather than the ideas themselves.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[AJWM]

So what if it does? We have no shortage of altruistic knowledge-seekers, especially if the chilling effect of potential lawsuits by greedy knowledge seekers is reduced.

But whether it does or doesn't, that's irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is discussing trying to prevent the lock-up or proprietization of knowledge which is already free and has been for hundreds of years.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[CastrTroy]

Most people say that downloading music files isn't theft. It's breach of copyright, but it isn't theft. Theft has certain legal meanings. People don't want it being called theft, because it isn't. It is copyright infringement though, and most people can't make up a reasonable argument that it is not. The real question is, is whether or not this copyright infringement is moral.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Malc]

Information by itself is worthless. It's what you do with it that's important. A good example is the work of the Wellcome Trust and Sanger Centre to keep sequencing of the human genome in the public domain and out of the hands of some greedy bastards. Humanity has a whole has benefited far more.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[gblfxt]

Yes yes, knowledge is a limited resource, kinda like oil I guess. Give it up capitalist, there is no end to knowledge, it just builds on itself.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[SolemnDragon]

i think (disclaimer: i am not an economist, and haven't balanced my chequebook in long enough that any financial advisement from me should inspire skepticism, at best) that making everything free doesn't destroy business in the traditional healer realm- how much interest in tourism, etc, will be drummed up by having this cultural background available for people to peruse? Completely aside from any medical value the therapies may or may not have, this is interesting from a cultural standpoint, and for that reason, making it free and available- in particular, the being free lends to its availability for all- increases interest in where it's from.

More importantly, how much more valuable to the country will this information be when displayed as originating from that country, than it would be as "Dr. ___'s" own concoction?

It also allows anyone to treat according to these recipes, which (again, regardless of medicinal merit, which doesn't enter into this)increases wealth, doesn't it? With more people able to provide a thing, doesn't that mean that more goods and services will be changing hands?

I can't answer to the art portion of this; medicine, in my view, is more like mathematics- they're basically offering he formula to the people, so that no one can charge you five bucks every time you use a square.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[jesterpilot]

Information can be useful.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Mistshadow2k4]

You say that as if it were a bad thing.... People doing good for others for altruistic purposes rather than profit?! How horible! I dunno, maybe those who seek to reap the benefits of such patents might have to work for a living like everyone else if that were to happen. That would be a terrible, terrible thing.

I definitely applaud this move. Patenting something that's been a known remedy for years - if not centuries, even - in India is like me patenting chamomile tea for soothing upset stomachs. Ridiculous, but is is happening, and I can see why they'd want to prevent any more of it from happening.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[jonbryce]

These are things that have *already* been invented, and were invented without the need for patents, or perhaps even because the lack of patents meant that these people could build existing knowledge without having to get someone else's permission, and without having to pay a lawyer to get it through the courts.

Most of the time, the US believes that the free market, free of government interference is the best way forward, and I totally agree. Even, or especially where the development of knowledge and ideas is concerned.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[DrMrLordX]

Not really. Musicians, for example, existed long before any of them could secure the rights to their own music in any real or legal sense. Creative people will wind up creating things because they need to do so as much as they want to do so. It's "in their blood".

"Making everything free" will certainly change how wealthy creative people can be at any given time, and it might chase some opportunists out of creative fields, but those who are bound to create will still create.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Digital Vomit]

No.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Stonehand]

In certain areas, perhaps.

That said, all the good intentions in the world won't buy you controlled long-term studies of sufficient quality to reduce the odds of later getting roundly smacked by an army of lawyers when it turns out that your attempted treatment slightly but reliably increases the chance of suffering a stroke or aneurysm.

Of course, we could do away with the FDA and health regs and say "caveat emptor", but we saw what happened before with all the bogus snake-oils, right?

Saying "it's in their blood" is a cop-out; motives do not grant means, and in some cases the means are bloody hard to get without very significant resources.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all missing the point.

People should pay more for scarce resources.
People should pay less for abundant resources.

There is no scarcity of knowledge, so knowledge should be free.

If you are not creating new knowledge and are just reselling old knowledge, then you are a BROKER, and should not be suprised when someone tries to sell the same knowledge for cheaper.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[bommai]

I don't know about other pursuits and comforts in life, but for the healing arts such as ayurveda, the ancient Indians treated this as a service than a way to make money. In fact, ayurveda was taught from generation to generation by disciplined teachers to disciplined students, and no money ever changed hands. The thought of material wealth was never present. That was the power of healing. That is also the reason why most of the ayurvedic medical technologies and the associated medicines were never patented.

Of course, the modern medical system (both in India and abroad) has completely changed that and now health care (or rather sick care) has become a money making industry!!

Too bad, due to the power of money, alternative medicine has not taken off much because there is no money in it. And, by alternative medicine, I don't mean a bunch of natural vitamins that people buy for big bucks at a healthfood store.

During my last visit to India, I was impressed with an ayurvedic hospital. My wife had severe body pains due to fibromylagia and she went through some intense hot medicinal oil therapy and she felt a lot better. I used to have severe sinus infections frequently and for the past 3 years I have been much better. I did some research and there are records of doctors doing some intensive surgery with anaesthesia using ayurvedic techniques at least 2000 years ago.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh probably...
if your idea of incentive is one of ownership or other properterian reward.
There are other incentives, such as improving the state of humanity, satisfaction of curiosity, etc.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It sure killed Linux!

Futile?

[AJWM]

From the US PTO's track record of granting patents to almost anyone who pays the fee, and ignoring any "prior art" that isn't in a previous patent (and sometimes not even then), this may be futile.

Oh, it is certainly worth doing, and I applaud the effort. Not every country's patent system is as messed up as the US's is.

Re:Futile?

[drinkypoo]

What might you find? That a government institution funded by patent applications is, indeed, going to be running slipshod over their purpose and mandate?

Re:Futile?

[PsychicX]

India got a patent on turmeric, used in curries, revoked
Somebody want to hunt down that patent? I would love to know how that worked.

Re:Futile?

[Seumas]

Oh, it is certainly worth doing, and I applaud the effort. Not every country's patent system is as messed up as the US's is.

That's why we're trying to spread democracy and Christianity you tard! ;)

Re:Futile?

[openfrog]

Being moded "insightful" for casting this effort in the shadow of futility is beyond me.

Getting patents for things that have been in the public domain, sometimes for thousands of years, is the most graphic demonstration of the insanity of the current and recent abuses of the patent system and is probably one of the best example to use in the effort to convince public opinion around the world that something is amiss and that we need to take action.

What the Indian government is doing is far from being futile. It is what needs to be done, in that case and many others, and what ought to be emulated by other governments and public organisations.

Re:Futile?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems clear to me then that patent office has (or should have) liability upon its hands. If they are negligent (or even blatantly ignoring the facts in order to assure they get payed for granting a new patent) and grant the patent that is wrong, then it is only fair and just that they should be held responsible to pay damages and all expenses to anyone who suffers because of their wrongdoing. This "I don't care, I do nothing, just pay me for stamping the paper" attitude is unacceptable when consequences of their mistakes are so serious.

Re:Futile?

[Anonymous Coward]

...Or else, if patent office can't possibly manage to thoroughly research and investigate every application patentability, the burden (both in terms of work AND liability) should be placed on applicants: submit patent application that gets invalidated by prior art - be prosecuted for perjury eventually. So, don't come to Patent Office unless you are absolutely positively sure that you are not "placing rope around your neck" yourself.

The REAL motive

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until Dr. Kala decides to publish her encyclopedia... as a collection of patent applications.

It is probably redundant anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even without this project, any patents on these kinds of traditional knowledge will be rendered null and void due to the following factors:

1) Such knowledge has been used for thousands of years (prior art).

2) Usage of said knowledge continues unfettered today.

3) If I were to use any patented traditional knowledge and got sued for it, all I have to do show the ancient manuals showing said knowledge and sue the other party for millions.

So:

1) Use patented traditional knowledge today.
2) Get sued.
3) Counter sue for $xx million.
4) Show prior art of traditional knowledge.
5) Win both cases.
6) PROFIT!!!

Re:It is probably redundant anyway.

[Br00se]

Except that you would get to pay for your defense, and depending on where the suit takes place, there my be no grounds to countersue. In short, even if you win, it still costs you a small fortune.

Re:It is probably redundant anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Find traditional Indian cure for modern ailment in database
2. Patent and sell cure realizing that the patent system is so broken anyway that by the time the patent is revoked you'll be set to retire in the tropics
3. Profit!

Re:India?

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA, Please. The first sentence is
  In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying in information.

It's about making public, the traditional medical knowledge that Indian doctors have had since long so that a) it benefits the common and b) it hopefully puts an stop on malicious Patenting by outside countries (as was the case with Turmeric patent which India got revoked.)

Hasn't stopped anyone yet

[Havenwar]

Prior art hasn't really stopped anyone yet. I guess having a patent for a year or so can be valuable enough even if it is contested. Besides, if this is traditional knowledge, who will dispute the claim? Things like... "uhm, we knew that..." doesnt seem to hold up very well in court. Not even if you have it published.

Re:Hasn't stopped anyone yet

[vijaya_chandra]

Some people'd definitely take the trouble (especially when some huge company with excess of money's gonna start charging licensing fees from you for all kinds of stupid things)
Check this out
http://www.hindu.com/2005/03/09/stories/2005030902 381300.htm

In this particular case along with saying - uhm, we knew that.... they'd shown proof of people using the technique from a long time also though.

Re:Hasn't stopped anyone yet

[Havenwar]

Well, I am glad that things are not quite as depressing as I see them. At least some people stand up against patenting. I find it quite hilarious though that in the article you linked they claim it was piracy to file a patent for somethign already known, while usually the only piracy peopel mention is when something patented is recreated by others without licensing.

Nah, I do believe patenting it self is the thing to blame for this and many other problems.

you're correct

[circletimessquare]

After a while, doesn't making everything free kind of destroy the incentive for all but the most altrustic knowledge-seekers?

but it is also true that over-extending ownership of knowledge is just as detrimental to incentives to create more

it's all balance, and in the current world climate the danger is over-extending ownership, not in under-extending. if and when such a world happens, your words will be important, but your words don't describe the current danger

About time

[vineet000]

Finally, this will hopefully put an end to the disgusting practice of patenting things know for eons. Taxmati my a$$...

Re:India?

[TheLoneDanger]

Yes, it is fashionable on Slashdot to only read the frequently inaccurate article summary or even just the damned title, but READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE ONCE IN A WHILE!

Honestly, why take the time to fucking post if you can't be bothered to spend the 1-2 minutes it should take you to at click the link and at least skim over the article? The very title of the article would tell you that it is INDIA that is doing this to try to prevent traditional knowledge from being patented in the US. And don't say anything about slashdotting, because the article is on BBC which has more than enough bandwidth to handle repeated slashdottings.

Who's the victim?

[castoridae]

Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they describe as "bio-piracy" for a long time.

I would think that the citizens of India are the least likely to be victimized by such a patent. It would seem that it won't hold in their country, so noone there can be barred from using these therapies. And the average non-Indian citizen of, say, the U.S. is unlikely to start using these therapies - and hasn't heard of them in any case. The only victim I see (other than a lot of peoples' sense of fair play) would be those of Indian descent living abroad in the U.S. or another nation whose patent system doesn't recognize these therapies as prior art.

Of course, I'm referring to what I assume the vast majority of these therapies are - esoteric. The more mainstream ones (e.g. turmeric, rice) - those could be a problem.

Re:Who's the victim?

[cherokawa]

it is more a matter of principle - how can someone brand something that has existed for thousands of years as their own invention/discovery? its not like they invented it themselves - most of the time they are copying it from an already existing text, with a little modification here and there. doesnt matter if it affects indian citizens or not.... and not to mention that no credit is given to the ancient indians who actually discovered the cures....

Re:Who's the victim?

[castoridae]

I think it DOES matter if it affects Indian citizens. There are an awful lot of problems that DO affect them every day - and these are better problems to spend resources on (from the Indian gov'ts POV. From other gov't POV, fine this is good as a mis-issued patent could cost their citizens $$).

As far as the ancient Indians... somehow, I don't think they really mind.

Re:Who's the victim?

[drinkypoo]

Actually, China is least likely to be affected by this kind of crap, because they give not one fuck about foreign patents. I'd like to see India go the same way, though...

Re:Who's the victim?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe the ancient indians dont mind, but the current generation DOES mind that credit is not being given to indians - current or ancient - and corp XYZ is named as the inventor... and please, the "better use of resources" argument that every westerner falls back on, sounds lamer and lamer as each day goes by.....

Re:Who's the victim?

[Anonymous Coward]

As previously mentioned, both basmati and the "Tree of Life" have been patented.
If the company which owns the patent does not want the Indian population to use their patented technology, they can file a claim with the WTO. As a member of the WTO, the Indian gov't is required to stop illegal patent use.

What should the Indian gov't do at this point?

Please open your eyes about reality before you post from your valley of ignorance.

Look up and read some of the writings of Arundhati Roy, and listen to Democracy Now.

Re:Who's the victim?

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to know that you know what "every westerner" does...

Re:Who's the victim?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is companies (like say, Aveda) that might have problems due to competition, and pharmas and biotechs that push drugs that do as much harm as good that will get affected. And that is a good thing.

Re:Who's the victim?

[terrymr]

Yeah well imagine the surprise of people living in India when they found their rice and spices had been patented by US Corporations and were facing demands for vastly overpriced seeds in order to continue growing what they had for hundreds of years.

Anc check out Iraq's new seed patent laws : http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=6

Re:Who's the victim?

[chill]

You're forgetting companies in India that want to export medicines based off of those patents. They'll be locked out of the most lucrative markets.

  -Charles

Re:Who's the victim?

[Morgalyn]

Thank you for posting that article. I found it very interesting.

Re:Who's the victim?

[sid1234]

Well, as others have suggested, please take some time to read the article completely. The article clearly states that most of the pharmacy company use plant based extract for preparing medicine and not to forget the fact that quote " 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin." People in India have traditional books which clearly describes the benefit of these and how and where to use it. Unfortunately they are not openly or easily available leading to Bio piracy which is what Indian government is trying to prevent instead of investing million of $$$ to revoke patents by foreign countries. and on the positive side of it, why reinvent the wheel. By opening this repository, Indian govt. is making a great knowledge accessible to everyone which may help companies develop modern medicines.

"Alternative" medicine?

[consonant]

Practitioners of traditional medicines say their importance cannot be denied - according to the WHO, 70% of the people living in India use traditional medicine for primary health care.

Also, some 42% of the people living in the US and 70% of the people living in Canada have used traditional medicines at least once for treatment.

One has to ask how many of that Indian 70% depend on 'traditional' medicine out of choice. Most people in India simply cannot afford expensive 'modern' medicine.

On another note, the term "alternative medicine" has to be taken with a pinch of salt. A casual stroll through the marketplace of any major Indian city will reveal a surpsisingly large number of quacks peddling "miracle cures" through alternative medicine.

That said, Ayurveda is certainly a very effective form of treatment. Note the lack of comparison with 'modern' medicine - no authoritative research on this exists, only sponsored studies by organizations with vested interests, not unlike Microsoft-sponsored Windows vs. Linux TCO studies...

That's good

[mrRay720]

It's disgusting that people are even allowed to patent naturally occuring biological phenomenon. Patenting medicinal properties of plants/animals, DNA sequences, and suchlike is just plain bad. Taking credit for your own creations is fine, but not nature's.

For anyone wanting to wave the "if you don't let them patent it and rape the world for money for a simple discovery, nothing will get discovered - ever!" flag, I'd rather have a wordwide tax that funds such research.

If you're religious or not (and I'm not), I'm sure most people will get just a little uneasy at the idea of patenting aspects of life itself. A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? Screw that.

Re:That's good

[Anonymous Coward]

A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? Screw that.

Actually, don't screw anything. At least not until you pay me. I have a patent on screwing. And on being born.

Re:That's good

[wk633]

As much as I agree with you A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? is overreaching. I think genetic patents are bad, but you don't infringe them by simply having the patented gene. The patent is on a process involving knowledge of what the gene does, not simply having the gene in your dna.

Re:That's good

[lawpoop]

The problem is it takes a lot of money and time to extract these secrets from nature. So if it takes $30 million and 10 years research to figure out how to get something useful from a plant, and then as soon as you come out with it someone rips you off?

These people aren't just cherry-picking money from nature. That's why they want patent protectiong. They do want to make money, but it takes a *lot* of money and probably decades up front before you start making money off of it. There really is no free ride.

Re:That's good

[JourneyExpertApe]

Hey, I patented whiney liberal rants. Pay up!

Re:That's good

[mean pun]

The problem is it takes a lot of money and time to extract these secrets from nature.

You miss the point. The register intends to record traditional cures and remedies. The effort to extract these secrets from nature has been made by people a long time ago, and the register tries to ensure that nobody tries to claim that effort as their own. There indeed is no free ride.

Re:That's good

[sid1234]

Well ya, no one is patenting because they know what turmeric or neem is. They are patenting the fact that they know how to extract biproducts from them to effectively treat some thing. This is not directly available in nature and hence deserves a patent. The point is you need to know how to use it and when and where to use it and what aspect it cures. This is why every Big pharma company spends so many million $$$ to research to find out, because its about health and if some side effects are there they will get sued. So if a person knows how to use it effectively and can show the proof, he should deserve a patent ( followed by money) since it is really a long and arduous process to properly validate it.

Re:That's good

[lawpoop]

Unfortuneately, it doesn't work like that. I have a Bachelor's in anthropology and I focused on ethnobotany.

What this database will probably give you is some thing like:

Creeping Treeclimber aphorensis creepius

• Used by the BthongaThonga people in an admixture of 50+ other plants said to be helpful against spirit posession.
• Merck scientists derived a compound from it that was effective in a cell culture of non-hodgekin's lymphoma.

Now, did the BthongaThonga people really discover the cure for non-Hodgekins lymphoma?

You are hardly ever going to get an exact match between traditional use and modern western scientific use. The only one that comes readily to mind is Chinchona bark, which was used by Native South Americans for 'fevers', which was later used to synthesis the quinine, the first anti-malarial drug. Now, people can't say that these Shamans had a cure for malaria, because there are a lot of other things that cause fevers. They were using Cinchona for all kinds of fevers, including malaria.

Then you have the new-agers who say "Shamans really don't realize what they are doing. They talk about magic darts and spirit posession, but really they are doing nothing different than modern doctors."

Sorry, wrong. I was on a 10-week field school and talked to a few shamans. Disease is caused by magic darts. These plants cure magic darts. If you challenge them on that, they will tell you *emphatically* that "No, demons are real, magic darts are real. If you have an occidental (western) disease, go in to town and see a doctor. However, if you need a dart removed, I'm your man."

The cases where traditional uses sync up totaly with western uses will be few and far between.

Re:That's good

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have a Bachelor's in anthropology and I focused on ethnobotany"

It has nothing to do with moral and ethics.

"...Chinchona bark, which was used by Native South Americans for 'fevers', which was later used to synthesis the quinine, the first anti-malarial drug. Now, people can't say that these Shamans had a cure for malaria, because there are a lot of other things that cause fevers. They were using Cinchona for all kinds of fevers, including malaria."

Well, actually quinine could be easily extracted from the bark - not a rocket science, just like extracting C-vitamine from pepper etc.
Pretending this was a great and separate archievement is a falsification od fact bagatelizing the archivement of native medication.

To me you seems to be one of those taking for free and selling it to the highest bidder. Of course it's a very common practice - the whole capitalistic world builds on exploitaions like this.

I hope that some day you can not afford to pay for services you need badly.
That's not nice - nope because you're not a nice person but an arrogant leec.

Culture and medicine!

[mister_llah]

I think this is a great idea, even beyond medicine.

Knowledge of these medical traditions can give great insight the cultures they originated from (I say this since they are obviously not the current culture, though they might be cultural anscestors) ....

I'd love to see more movements like this, not just medicine, but traditional stories and the like, as well.

I love technology!

Re:India?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article hopes to "curry" favour.... HAHA!

interesting, considering india patent issues

[passingNotes.com]

from my understanding, many large drug companies already have operations in india and one recurring issue with development (research) sites is the lack of adherence to patent infringement rules in the drug discovery and development process. this issue has been written about before extensively, and quite a while back...and so now, after large conglomerates have pissed and moan to the indian government about these issues it seems to be coming full circle - but with a far less defensible position (good luck patenting 'wellness' methods) .......and what will be the future for ayurvedic physicians across the usa seeking approval in the absence of a real licensure system? whatever.

Public Domain

[GillBates0]

When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions.

With the ever increasing Intellectual Property statutes (backed by individual nations and/or the WTO) and an ever increasing number of litiguous IP whores, public domain knowledge is sadly stagnant (if not diminishing). More power to anybody putting in time/effort/resources into increasing the repository of unencumbered knowledge and intellect available to us.

Is this a good thing?

[Tim2005]

I didn't read the article, but this is a cautionary note on patents with regards to developing new drugs.

In the pharma industry, it is a well known fact that no drug company will touch a treatment or compound that doesn't have firm patent protection. Why? To take a starting compound through all the necessary testing and development stages requires 800 million dollars on average. Even for a compound which looks relatively safe and effective, it still costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get through clinical trial testing and FDA approval stages. By design, it's not a cheap or easy process by any means.

If a drug company doesn't think it has iron-clad patent protection that will stand up in court, it won't risk these huge sums of money, and consequently, the drug will never get developed.

If any new drugs are treatments stand to be developed from traditional treatments, working to prevent patents based on them is not the way to promote new cures.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[vineet000]

you live in a different world, in india people dont spend 800 million to create a mint pill that soothes a tender tummy.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Forbman]

But it won't stop all the vitamin and herbal remedy people from picking them up and selling them, albeit without the mantle of the FDA saying that they are useful for anything or as part of any treatment.

Research *will* be done on these folk remedies, and any glimmer of efficacy revealed by these small-scale studies will be trounced upon by the herbal remedy companies as facts that the stuff is "good" for something.

Just because Abbott Laboratories, Glaxo, Lilly, Novaris, et al. don't pick up on them, doesn't mean that someone won't.

And, if a compound in some herbal remedy is finally isolated that actually does do things well, if a company like the above can make a synthetic analogue which it can patent (the process to make it and derivatives, not necessarily the compound in and of itself), it will invest the $$$ to run traditional medical trials and get an FDA-approved product.

Basically, if it's a useful compound like digitoxin or curare, it will eventually be used when a "legitimate" pharma makes it and it becomes FDA-approved in a given treatment protocol.

After all, Wrigley Gum doesn't make Nicorette (even though it easily could. They'd just have to source out the nicotine used in it), but one of the Pharmas does, because Nicorette is a drug delivery device..

If someone figured out how to put a pediatric medicine into Pez tablets, do you think the candy company that makes Pez would make it? Nope. One of the Pharmas would (it'd be a drug delivery device).

Re:Is this a good thing?

[rawwa.venoise]

wait here. Malaria diseas can be easily cured using quinino a natural substance which occurs on tropical florest. If this marvelous drug had solid patents on it people suffering from malaria couldn't be cured for free. But i give you a stronger example.
If Alexander Flemming in 1928 had patented the first antibiotic most soldiers in second world war would die from large infections. People wouldn't be able to treat simple infections with lower costs. Nothing stops a company to use a natural drug and refine if further. Today antibiotics are surelly different from the first ones. And we do not use the original drug any more. So think about it. Why can't any company to study a natural product and improve it further? Then YES, you should patent your newly product, not the natural one.
And here everybody beneffits from this public knoledge. If today labs had to pay for an antibiotic license you would't have such large drug variety. Has most people should know with the increasing usage of antibiotics most affected micro-organims tend to develope some resistance and create a new infectious form. I doubt the labs would invest money in creating new antibiotics forms if they had to license it first.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[wk633]

The article isn't talking about research based on Indian plants, it's talking about patenting existing cures that use Indian plants. Nobody is inventing anything new. They're taking things that people have been doing for thousands of years, and claiming them as new discoveries of their own.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

But it won't stop all the vitamin and herbal remedy people from picking them up and selling them, albeit without the mantle of the FDA saying that they are useful for anything or as part of any treatment.

Sorry, you need to read "Prevention" Magazine. It's for people who want "natural" remedies, but they're the first ones to say that 90% of the "herbal" remedies are fraudulent.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Kaa]

In the pharma industry, it is a well known fact that no drug company will touch a treatment or compound that doesn't have firm patent protection. Why? To take a starting compound through all the necessary testing and development stages requires 800 million dollars on average. Even for a compound which looks relatively safe and effective, it still costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to get through clinical trial testing and FDA approval stages. By design, it's not a cheap or easy process by any means.

You forgot to mention the critical part: "in the USA".

That's a problem with the approval process, which the pharma companies obviously like since it's a huge barrier to entry. A new drug (especially based on traditional plant remedies) should NOT cost $800m to develop and test.

I bet that in a few years some Asian countries with less irrational fears of new drugs will be developing and producing useful new medicines, while the US will be still stuck in the regulatory quagmire...

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Tim2005]

I hope the AC who made this comment will forgive me for quoting him (I wanted to make sure it was heard): "Sorry, you need to read "Prevention" Magazine. It's for people who want "natural" remedies, but they're the first ones to say that 90% of the "herbal" remedies are fraudulent." This really does get a the crux of the issue. A good chunk of the money that is spent on a drug development involves insuring its effectiness and safety. This means large clinical trials involving thousands of patients, hundreds of scientists, extensive animal testing, and critical review by the FDA. Even with this, some drugs still slip through that prove to hurt some of the people they are meant to help. That's what we do here in the West, far different from how things are done in, say, India. That's why 800 million is spent to make sure that 'mint' pill that help your upset stomach also won't eat away at the gastric lining over time. Without this, it's all snake-oil saleman's and old wive's tales. This is how it was a hundred years ago in the US. This is what we have worked to get away from.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Tim2005]

"That's a problem with the approval process, which the pharma companies obviously like since it's a huge barrier to entry. "

That's absurd. Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.

The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug development cycle. They hate that it costs so much and takes so long. If it were to cost less they would make, much, much, more money.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[rawwa.venoise]

eat less fat food and you don't need the "mint" pill ...

Re:Is this a good thing?

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

This isn't completely true. Many drugs such as tomaxforin(sp) where originally isolated as natural substances which you can't patent. They alter the molecult to make it better and patent that. There is no chilling effect here, in fact a database like this might provide leads for researchers.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[jonbryce]

But these drugs have already been developed, and have been in use for thousands of years.

Patenting these drugs is not going to incentivise Indian scientists from thousands of years ago to invent more of them.

Of course, if someone were to come up with a new and non-obvious treatment based on one of these drugs, they could patent that, but not the original drug it was based on.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man! talk about a troll. It doesn't take "billions and billions" to perform drug research. Most of the money is to pay for corruption and massive featherbedding of various adjacent industries. The main reasons hospitals charge so much is to make giant purchases of land and pay of the politicians for building permits and such. The people that actually build medical equipment don't make much more than you or me, but the people running the running the company is somebody's useless brother in law who got the job so the boss's wife(or lover) will give up some nookie. Your arguement doesn't hold water. It never did, but unfortunately, too many people still fall for it. And let's not even get into the insurance side of this. They did more to drive up prices than anybody.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[cduffy]

To take a contrarian view...

Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.

Why is the lost revenue that large? Because they're able to charge so much for the drugs they develop. Why are they able to charge so much? Because their development and regulatory costs are so high as to reduce effective competition.

The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug development cycle.

For themselves; not necessarily for anyone and everyone who may be interested in entering the field.

(Warning: The above BS is not guaranteed to be 100% pure).

Re:Is this a good thing?

[WilliamSChips]

Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.

Isn't that just a corollary of Sturgeon's Law?

Re:Is this a good thing?

[torokun]

This is not quite true. A substance that exists in a usable form in nature is not patentable. Likewise, methods to extract substances from plants, or extracted substances that are known and used, are also not patentable.

But improvements such as extracting and refining a substance from a plant, so that it's usable in a pure form, as opposed to a mixture or an adulterated form as found in the plant, IS patentable. In general, this is the sort of thing that companies are doing. (There are also cases where there is no documentation or way to show 'traditional knowledge', such that invalid patents end up being granted...)

Even if the plants and their known uses are publicly disclosed, that doesn't preclude someone from experimenting with the plant, and extracting and purifying substances from the plant. Such improvements would be patentable even though the traditional uses are known, because they are an improvement over the traditional uses or substances. So this database won't prevent such patents.

I support IP rights in traditional knowledge and natural resources, because there is real value in those things that our companies are exploiting. Granting such rights to developing countries would give them great incentives to protect these biological resources that are so critical to chemical and drug development.

Unfortunately, this sort of disclosure just cuts against the goal of actually compensating developing countries for such things. If they are convinced to give them away for free, rather than fight for recognized international IP rights in them, they will never get anything for them, and critical biological resources will continue to be overused.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[nmd_sbu]

Traditional Indian and Chinese medicine have gone through their own clinical testing for centuries. You think someone tripped and fell on tumeric and it healed their scrape. They probably went through thousands of plants nature had to offer, until they knew which plant cured what. These plant remedies have kept the Indian and Chinese alive for centuries, not Pzifer or Merck.

Just because you made enriched flour from wheat, does not give you the right to patent wheat, and prevent farmers from growing wheat oand consumers from buying it.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Fenster Karton]

That is why cesium chloride is not used to treat cancer - it can't be patented. The gvt should pay the 800 million for the trials. University tests had a 97% cure rate for cancer in the mouse trials. Medicine in the US is mostly about money.

btw, gonna patent my yoga move: supineplaya

[passingNotes.com]

my move, supineplaya, is a supine position, neck and jaw clenched while holding a controller playing people on xbox360 live in a gt50 ferrari in project gotham and hearing everybody yell and swear. take deep breaths, relax abdomen, clench jaw and neck, pursing lips is optional (typically during loss stage)

So would these measures be called...

[consonant]

Bio-DRM?

Yeah, about that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try explaining that to growers of Basmati rice.

Music CDs dont cure diseases

[absinthminded64]

Traditional medicine . . I'm thinking this probably includes substances/techniques that have been in use for centuries and if it's a developing country where YOUR patent wouldn't be inforcable anyway what's the harm in their being able to develop and use something that increases their quality of life?

Condescending fucker.

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't had much experience with court cases involving big companies, have you?

Ya know, the ..., have you? is really fucking condescending. I would just come out and say, "Dude, a court case will last at least 5 years ... "

Personally, I'd rather be called a fucking idiot than have the "have you?" tagged on a comment. But, that's just me.

Re:Condescending fucker.

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't been having a good day, have you?

You sir, are ignorant of the ways of the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ignorance is only surpassed by the vastness of the universe.

Basmati rice has already been patented.
The "Tree of Life" has already been patented.

You misunderstand

[Lifewish]

The biopiracy they're talking about is big companies coming in, finding traditional remedies that work, patenting the use of herb X as part of said remedy and then attempting to charge the locals for the privilege of using their own traditional medicines. The aim is not to keep control of the IP but to stop anyone else claiming it in a harmful fashion.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Databas

[pfafrich]

Another project with similar aims of establishing prior art as a defence against frivolous patenting in the plant domain is Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database or (T.E.K.* P.A.D.). (disclaimer I've contributed a large dataset to this database).

Why the USPTO is so bad

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I have approx ten patents (over the last 15 years or so) and it seems to me that it is easier to get a crappy patent through now than ever before. The USPTO have got to be like this because of various factors.

It's a system by the lawyers for the lawyers: Applying for a patent makes the patent lawyer some money. The amount of money he makes is inversely related to the quality of the patent. The more effort he has to put into filing a dodgy patent, the more he gets to charge. Then of course if it ever gets disputed you enter the big time.

The mighty buck: USPTO is a cash cow for Uncle Sam. Charge fees with no accounability. If you make it too hard for people to get patents then less will apply so you make less money. I bet those online colleges make more money than real universities and the same goes for USPTO.

Quotas: I expect (don't know), that the USPTO staff are not measured on the quality of the patents they issue but more on how many apps they can crank in a week. Come the end of the week and you are a bit behind quota then you just slide em through without even understanding them.

Re:Why the USPTO is so bad

[IAmTheDave]

Don't forget that getting a patent overturned is an incredibly expensive proposition, costing much more than getting the original patent. More money for lawyers.

Re:Why the USPTO is so bad

[xenocide2]

He didn't. He specifically said that when a patent is disputed, ie it might get overturned, would be the Big Time Money.

Cochrane Library and SK has them beat

[saskboy]

http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/ has India beat by a long shot. It's the world's most comprehensive medical database, and Saskatchewan is the first province in Canada to offer free access to it for anyone in the province with a library card.

Re:Cochrane Library and SK has them beat

[shdragon]

The Indian project is about putting traditional (called "alternative" in the west) medicine online, not putting Western medicine knowledge online. That's been done for awhile now. These are traditional Indian medicines and knowledge passed down through oral & folk tradition. The primary reason behind this is US & EU companies gaining patents for things which prior art exists but is not easily findable or searchable in the West.

Re:Cochrane Library and SK has them beat

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you completely missed the fact that these are two extremely different projects. The conchrane project is meant to organize all current medical knowledge supported by testing in todays world. the purpose of the indian database is to collect all the traditional treatments in india(which number over one hundred thousand). It will not have anything in it about stints or other completely modern devices at all while the conchrane library will have very little in it about things in indian tradition.

The point is to avoid patenting

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point is to have documented proof that those practices are already of public knowledge and therefore cannot be restricted to be used only by the owner of the patent.

It's like I was going to patent the process of making ice cubes and the US Patent office grants me the patent. Then I could go after the ice makers, eventhough the process of making ice cubes is been known for years. That's silly.

So the Patent office would look at those docs and say "That's stupid, everyone knows how to make ice cubes"

By publishing all this knowledge, which is already KNOWN in India, then there is some proof so that the US Patent office doesn't just grant these rights to whoever feels like restricting the use of ice cubes.

Re:India?

[pfafrich]

Welcome to slashdot! don't let the moderators grid you down.

Re:India?

[laughing rabbit]

Just poke'm in the eye with a sharp stick and forget about it.

Re:India?

[SmellTheCoffee]

You just posted for the heck of it...didn't you. Such a insensitive comment gets to be modded funny is outrageous.

Extreme capitalism?

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent system is to us today what the Roman Catholic Church was to the people who woke up during the Renaissance era.

If progress is made, government institutions should reward it, not allow people to hog it. The system today is a product of extreme capitalism.

Ray

Re:Extreme capitalism?

[jonnythan]

If progress is made, government should reward it by......... letting the person make money off of it without everyone else directly ripping him off!

Fun with empiricism

[catalyst]

While there's nothing wrong with publishing a compendium of folklore per se, the reasoning behind this project leads to some fun slippery-slope problems. For example, could a folk medicine be considered "patented"?

And if so, can I patent other logical non-sequitors?

Like my method for facilitating TCP/IP transport via wearing lots of black?

Re:Fun with empiricism

[Stonehand]

If memory serves, efficacy is important -- the methods have to work for the stated application. That's really the one reason why you're not supposed to be able to patent impossibilities such as a perpetual-motion machine.

Re:Fun with empiricism

[sid1234]

Let me clarify something. Its is not folklore or a myth. No government will be creating a public repository by putting million $$s for that. There are Traditional books which discuss these treatments in detail and how and where to apply it.Just that it is not published in journal ( I doubt one such existed thousands of years ago) doesn't mean it doesnot work. And the best proof that it is not a myth, is that it works really well in practice.

Re:Fun with empiricism

[efuzzyone]

Just that it is not published in journal ( I doubt one such existed thousands of years ago) doesn't mean it doesnot work.
It might have been published and there might also have been peer reviews, but the problem is that it wasn't exposed to the western world. Knowledge is no good until it is shared with others.

Re:Fun with empiricism

[catalyst]

There are Traditional books which discuss these treatments in detail and how and where to apply it
There are also traditional books that discuss in detail the way an evil reptile forced humanity's only h0t ch1x0r to put on underwear. Not that I need to spell this out, then, but you are delusional if you think "tradition" is any more then weakly correlated with "truth".

And the best proof that it is not a myth, is that it works really well in practice.
If you refine your concept of "it" long enough, this statement will eventually be true. There are some traditional remedies that are indseed better than useless, there are some with the bad side effects that can result from ingesting unpurified plants whole, and there are many more that just don't do anything. It is that last group, in particular, that I refer to.

Re:Fun with empiricism

[catalyst]

That is my recollection as well. And in this case, the remedies in the compendium aren't directly being patented. But they *are* being used as "prior art", which because it supersedes a patent, is sort of like a common-law patent, in that it blocks a specific application.

Re:Fun with empiricism

[sid1234]

"There are also traditional books that discuss in detail the way an evil reptile forced humanity's only h0t ch1x0r to put on underwear." What crap are you talking about? I understand that there are many silly mythical tales but this is no story telling. The fact that many pharma companies are trying to work and patent it proves that. So these people in India are trying to prove that it already exists. "there are some with the bad side effects that can result from ingesting unpurified plants whole, and there are many more that just don't do anything." Did you ever watch a commercial ad for medicine in TV?? Every such damn ad ends with side effects ( which I think scares you more and keeps you away from it). Taking any medicine in the wrong way is bound to have side effects. ( I am talking of genuine products which have medicinal value, like turmeric, neem, clove etc. EATING BUNCH OF GRASS WILL CAUSE INDIGESTION). That is why these pharma companies invest millions to find out how to use it . But the fact is that it is already known and that is exactly what the Indian Govt. is trying to show by putting up the repository. There are medicine fields called Ayurveda and Homopathy which only use these techniques and they work wonderfully( I am telling because I have used them). So for people like you who don't know exactly how to use them, you better wait for the project to be done and then try some of the things. I am sure you will be surprised by the sophistication and delicate procedures involved in making some medicines.

Re:Fun with empiricism

[sid1234]

"Knowledge is no good until it is shared with others." I whole heartedly agree and I think that the project will serve the above purpose.

Um no

[g8oz]

First of all that is that site is not free, the Indian one will be.

The Cochrane Library consists of a regularly updated collection of evidence-based medicine databases

And from what I can see it has nothing to do with traditional medicine.

Re:India?

[SmellTheCoffee]

The languages reference provided are for westerns to look at it and find out information about the traditional medicines. Indians already know about them. The other reason, I think, the information is in those western languages is that documents in that languages can be used easily to challenge in court if a questionable patent comes up.

Divine right

[Ilex]

I'm no Christian fundamentalist but in the book of Genesis didn't god give all living things on earth to mankind. That means everybody has equal rights, kind of like a bio GPL.

Now given G.W Bush's right wing religious views and support for the teaching of intelligent design. Allowing the creation of these bio monopolies really is like condoning piracy.

So does Bush really believe in the word of god? or just the word of big business?

In either case I'd be worried about the voices he hears in his head telling him to invade 3rd world countries.

Now will someone please pass the tinfoil hat.

Re:Divine right

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no Christian fundamentalist but in the book of Genesis didn't god give all living things on earth to mankind. That means everybody has equal rights, kind of like a bio GPL.

Pretty much. The ownership of ideas is quite contrary to the Christian ethic.

So does Bush really believe in the word of god? or just the word of big business?

Not that I hate one party anymore than I hate the other, but judging from his behavior, it appears Bush "believes" whatever it takes to get elected.

Free Market

[bookemdano63]

I think making the medicine patentable will actually make them more widespread. Who is going to pay the millions of dollars to get a drug approved in the US, let alone the millions to market it, without the possibility of a profit.

Making it impossible to make money off the medicine will prevent the drugs from ever being scientificly tested and they will remain unused.

Re:Free Market

[Stonehand]

Hmmmmm. I wonder; isn't there a pretty heavy market in the relatively unregulated market of "supplements" and so forth? I don't think they're allowed to make specific claims about, say, curing diseases, lest they get treated as actual drugs, but that doesn't seem to stop people from buying gingseng and echinacea (sp?) and so forth.

The marketing would largely be word-of-mouth, perhaps supplemented by low-end cable and specific publications. If you're going to market random herbs or animal parts involved in Chinese folk medicine, for instance, a local vendor might consider putting an ad in a local Chinese-language newspaper and otherwise targeting the local Chinese immigrant community hoping to find customers who've kept with those customs. Perhaps one would also target the New Agers who readily turn to any and all forms of alternative medicine, although many would likely be a bit squeamish over the use of bears' gall bladders and so forth; and those other Westerners who've found Western medicine lacking for whatever reason. There's many who pay attention to more than just the latest ad blitz from Pfizer or whoever.

As a side note, I might suggest that there seems to be some audience for medical marijuana, even though it's not massively marketed or even legal (according to the Feds, anyway, and Federal jurisdiction over this hasn't been struck down AFAIK).

Re:Free Market

[Riktov]

Yes, perhaps, such drugs will remain unused. In industrialized countries where treatment is available only in the form of manufactured and commercially sold drugs.

But they will remain in use, as they always have been, in the form of "traditional" cures, in the countries where they originated (India in this case), for practically no cost, available to many many more people, who gain to benefit much more from their use.

Allowing the medicines to be patentable will allow the first at the expense of the latter.

Traditional "Medicine"

[bookemdano63]

Don't mean to be crass but the life expectancy in India is like 60. Maybe India should spend more time studying western medicine.

Re:Traditional "Medicine"

[Maqueo]

Don't be fooled by diluted western herbalism or new-agy stuff. Ayurveda (and related systems) are very effective and complete systems. Some of the surgical procedures and instruments originated in Ayurveda are still in use today.

The problem is that is instead of being used, it was supressed by the british when they occupied India.

Re:Traditional "Medicine"

[Anonymous Coward]

You just meant to be funny, not crass, I'm sure.

To address the point you make, yes, India does have a thriving medical community that practices western medicine. In fact, that is the dominant form of treatment an Indian will likely receive.

However, the posted article talks about bio-piracy. It is about patents handed out to Western companies that used the treatments from Ayurvedic system and claimed it to be their own invention. So, it is rather a case of the Western pharmas studying traditional Indian medicine.

Perhaps we'll all live shorter lives now. Going by your logic.

Re:Traditional "Medicine"

[sid1234]

Do you have any idea why that is the case?? Let me tell you that there is no medicine ( including "WESTERN" medicine) which cures hunger and poverty. Do you think that people only die because of lack of cure. Comon man, think before you post. Traditional medicine is very effective and many western medicines ( without your knowledge) uses these (Read the article).

Re:Karma

[Ilex]

This is not really a case of stealing someone else's intellectual property. It's more a case of corporations taking what's always been freely available to everyone then litigating so nobody can use it anymore.

Re:Karma

[SmellTheCoffee]

So you are saying the piracy going on in India is on much larger, grander scale than it is going on here in USA (music and RIAA come to mind immediately). The problem of piracy in India (and South Asia in general) is not because they are pirates or like to steal someone's hard work (without due reimbursement) but because it costs arm and a leg to pay for using Windows. That is why the free software movement to more likely to catch roots in developing countries than here. Bill Gates ran to India this week, the fourth time this year, just to keep people off open source. They even have stripped down windows available for about $38 dollars in those countries.

Re:India?

[Deinesh]

-1 troll? OK i will admit i was nervous as this was my first ever post, plus it was a "first post", and the result was that I crashed and burned. The text, "The BBC News Online has an interesting story about a project to put traditional medical knowledge online..." should have read, "The BBC News Online has an interesting story about a project GOING ON IN INDIA to put traditional medical knowledge online." My confusion was further enhanced by the fact that the languages being used were what I would expect the UK to use. I understand it now, but I really am not a troll. I really was confused. Sorry. I will probably go back under my bridge now and keep to myself.

Welcome to Slashdot. Feel free to post again when you figure out what RTFA means.

Re:India?

[el americano]

Point taken about RTFA, but is it too much to ask to have Title-Summary agreement? I see weak summaries from time to time, but obviously I am not the only one who wondered if this one belonged to another story. Who's project it is definitely shouldn't be left out, nor an explanation of the probably misused term, "bio-piracy" (as if "piracy" wasn't misused enough) Sounds more like patent-squatting to me.

I don't R every FA. I rely on titles and summaries to decide if I should.

P.S. Don't get mad about it, OK?

it's the movement that counts

[escay]

this move is not about making money off licensing, it's about opening information for everyone. what if a treatment that's been known for centuries suddenly becomes closed because of patent infringement? the OSS community here wouldn't have a problem empathizing with the cause. it wouldn't be entirely offtopic to bring to your attention Dr. Vandana Shiva, a known activist against biopiracy, who has won among others two major cases - the move to patent Basmati (a strain of rice) in US and the case of patenting a Neem-derived fungicide in Munich. this is a step in the right direction.

Re:India?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant, "...you insensitive clod!"

Re:Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

And India should feed its hungry poor before embarking on a space program?

And the U.S.A. should feed and shelter its hungry, homeless, poor before sending out the space shuttle missions?

Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Traditional doesn't mean "affordable" ..in fact given the super low per capita GDP .. 60 years sounds like a very high number.

Most over the counter medicines you buy originate in nature. For example, most cold medicines contain "pseudoephedrine HCL" which is a synthetic analog of from of what comes from the ephedra plant. Take a medicine and look up he origin of the active ingredient. Many important "cures" of the past were known to traditional doctors but uncredited (for example, quinine tree bark cures malaria .. even wikipedia credits someone who was cured by of malaria by Brazilian traditional healers using quinine as being the "discoverer" of the malaria cure. Just about all non prescription pain killers are of plant origin as well (morphene, Aspirin etc.). It's only the specialized medicines that have been produced recently over the last 15 years that are synthesized originally.

Prior art...

[ImaLamer]

Today it seems you use the prior art to show that your patent is possible and useful.

That's okay. Patents don't keep me from doing a lot of things myself, they just keep you from doing them for me. Now if only I could write my own mpeg2 decoder, and make my own medicine.

Anyone here take chemistry?

Great effort

[lovesinghal]

As the article has already mentioned that some of the traditional medicines are extensively used in India, this encyclopedia will enable people from the whole world to know about these medicines. Imagine searching on internet for a medicine for common cold or diabetes and finding couple of traditional remedies. People can leave their feedbacks and ratings of the remedies after they have tried them so that others can benefit too. Some of these medicines can be made at home using tea or neem leaves. They can be thus tried at home (and people need not go to an aurvedic doctor to get the medicine to some remote location in India). The good thing about natural medicines is that they do not have side effects. One can just try them and if they don't work try some other medicine. In US, it is interesting to see that even a small common cold medicine will have side effects as depression, nausea, liver failure, etc. I think as the health cost in US rises, more people will benefit from alternative of traditional medicines.

Re:Great effort

[Stonehand]

The good thing about natural medicines is that they do not have side effects.

That's a hell of an assertion to make.

I could suggest quite a variety of completely natural substances that would have remarkably deleterious effects when taken (in)appropriately. From plants, there's interesting chemicals in foxglove, belladonna, many mushrooms such as cheerfully named "Angel of Death", bitter almonds... And if we expand it to animals, their are numerous animals making quite effective poisons and venoms. Sea snakes, monarch caterpillars, pit vipers...

My Interview

[Milo Fungus]

When I interviewed at medical school a couple of years ago my interviewer asked me to name an ethical question and give arguments for both sides. I told him that I had recently read an interesting book that had a chapter describing how an opthalmologist had patented a certain surgical technique and demanded royalties from another opthalmologist who had independently discovered it and had been lecturing on his use of it.

The arguement against this sort of practice is easily the moral high ground, especially in a profession such as medicine which has a tendency to idealize altruism and selflessness. (Not that we succeed all of the time, mind you.) The counter-argument is the old line about creators being entitled to profit from their inventions. This argument is probably stronger in the entertainment industry, but in medicine it's pretty weak.

Proprietary software is actually a big problem in medicine, especially when patient data has to be exchanged between hospitals. I've seen entire imaging studies redone simply because the doctor who needed to see it didn't have the right software to view them. It's absurd to have to repeat an MRI for such a stupid reason.

I've actually considered doing a dual degree program and getting an MD/JD, with a legal specialty in intellectual property law. I predict that the intersection of medicine and IP law will be the scene of an important and bitter battle in the next few decades.

So how did my interview go? I got accepted!

Re:Just STFU...

[Vicissidude]

Sense please?

Who said I was against public domain knowledge?

It was common knowledge that willow bark reduced fever and inflammation. Putting that on a CD still means it's common knowledge, only now it's documented. That might inspire someone to create something similar to aspirin, but it doesn't give anyone the knowledge to actually brew up a batch of the drug that you keep in your medicine cabinet.

Oh and while you're at it, you might as well give the Indians the decimal system back, since it's based on...you guessed it...ancient Arabic/Indian Numerals [wikipedia.org].

First off, any link to Wikipedia is hardly trustworthy given the nature of the website. But, that is beside the point: Your argument is crap.

It's like saying we should thank the Arabs for Calculus because Isaac Newton used Arab numerals for his work. Yes, we should thank the Arabs for our numbering system. But, we should give the thanks for the invention of calculus to the person who did the bulk of the work for the system we currently use: Isaac Newton.

That is the exact same argument I have with the main thrust of this story.

Stop the greedy from utilize law for money

[Anonymous Coward]

I think their main objective to prevent some one patent/register/copyright local-herb medicine and claim ownership.

I think some company did that with other product like register name of indian rice's 'Basmati' (sp?) or Thai's rice 'Jusmine' (sp?) and then ask for money to those who sell those.

Re:India?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should outsource that data entry.

just as much now as ever..

[zogger]

There is just as much "snakeoil" with the FDA now as before they were invented. Artificial Vanilla? That's a wholesome "food"? Really? Aspartame? Artificial colors, flavors, additives?

*chuckle* That's snakeoil man, pure snakeoil..

  "Legal" drugs with suppressed bad effects tests, revolving door government agency drone, they retire, go direct to a big foodco or pharmco paycheck. Happens all the time. Google FDA,scandal, see what ya find. Pick a government agency, civil or military, it's all the same, and the FDA is no different. None. Some good meds, of course, a lot of bad ones, yep!

Naw, no snakeoil or corruption/lying there! Clean as a whistle! HAHAHAHA!

Times haven't changed, the snakeoil salesmen have just pimped out and gone uptown and are part of the government/corporate axis of maximum profits and skewed laws and brainwashing since birth on TV and in the schools. People are *just* as gullible as they always were, even moreso now, because most actually believe the fairytale that government exists to "serve them".

  Modern humans are not leeter or smarter than people a hundred years ago, we are exactly the same, we just have more gadgets and a government ten times bigger and ten times more corrupt and we have a hundred times or more sleazy corporate snakeoil companies.

language

[petermgreen]

how hard is it to admit foreign language prior art in a court particularlly if the language in question is some rare indic language?

one advantage i could see in translating sooner rather than later is that if the patent was filed after the translation was done then the translation itself would be prior art in some cases rather than merely being a translation of prior art. I'd imagine that could speed things up somewhat.

Re:language

[belmolis]

You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare" languages. Hindi has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.) Tamil has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.

Re:Just STFU...

[BrainInAJar]

without a concept of 0, you have no concept of manipulations involving limits approaching 0, so, yes... we should be thanking the arabs for calculus.

Blogging vs, the FDA?!?

[mcrbids]

I just had a thought - the FDA's approval process is a means by which feedback is obtained on the effectiveness of a drug prior to release. Blogging is another way to get feedback.

So, let's just kick out the drugs as cheaply as is possible, and let idiots try them to see if they work! Legally disclaim all liability and wait for comments to roll in...

"Hey man, I tried that sh!t, and man, it's like the Cat's meow, you know?"

"Three hours after taking the first pill, I began to heave violently. This continued for 3 more days, and now it turns out that I have pancreatic cancer. I don't recommend taking these pills!"

"I took this woodie medicine - and it worked! I tickled the old lady all night long. And then the next day, and the next night... now the doctor says that this will be my last woodie ever, if/when it ever actually does go flat..."

Yeah, it's a weird idea. But, given the efficacy of the "alternative" herb vendors, it just might work...

URL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know what the planned URL might be for this project? I'd be very interested in reading about traditional indian medicine. Wifey is really into this and maybe there is something better than mud to help bee sting swellings to go down.

Finally, a correct use of the word "Piracy"

[yeremein]

I like how this article uses the word "piracy" to describe actions supported by intellectual property law. Patenting something obvious and then extorting huge settlements from companies who "infringe" is a lot closer to the true meaning of the word "piracy", i.e., violent robbery, than, say, sharing MP3s.

aka Open source project patented, users sued

[geekotourist]

Another example is the Enola yellow bean, where an American company got a patent on a bean they'd bought from Mexican bean farmers. They then sued those farmers exporting yellow beans into the US.

Essentially farming has been an open source project, done by thousands of farmers over hundreds (or thousands) of years. But because any individual variety doesn't have an owner, the existance of the plant itself doesn't count as prior art. In earlier stories on Smart Breeding v. Biotechnology or Open Source Biotechnology, I wrote about some problems with proprietary aka closed hood genetics in food production:

• Specific problems solved by genetic engineering can also be solved in other ways. Word isn't the only way to write a document. Golden rice isn't the only way to get more vitamin A to people.
• Opportunity Costs- what do you lose if you spend a big chunk of money on a single proprietary solution? You lose flexibility. Continuing with Golden Rice: sure, its gets people more vitamin A. But if instead you spend the same money to give people wider access to vitamin-rich veggies you *also* give them more of the other vitamins and phytochemicals that we've selected for in those veggies for 3000+ years.
• The food itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle. The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
• The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
• they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures. For example: Andean potato farmers- they developed hundreds of different potato varieties over the years: buttery tasting ones, meaty tasting ones, ones that grow in drought / shade / various altitudes... and these potatoes could be susceptible to a particular pest (quite likely one or more of their varieties already had resistance: smart breeding is how you'd get that trait out from the one potato into the rest). A major North American company came in saying "Hey, our potato + pesticide combination is resistant to the pest. Buy both from us, then you'll have no problems. By the way our potato is patented- don't think about crossbreeding it." At the same time they launched a major advertising (FUD) campaign in major potato buying markets saying "Hey, our potato is the best most modern potato. Don't buy anything else." So farmers couldn't just patch their own potatoes- they had to buy into the product / product cycle upgrade of the NA company. Sounds familiar?
• they have all or nothing security models (they focus on zero tolerance for weeds / pests: in the long run this will be more expensive than "accept a marginal and mildly fluctuating loss" as they learned with citrus pests in California and Florida)
• They break standards. For example, BT is a bacteria /toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. Now that BT has been spliced into crop plants, the widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- will also become useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was their any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.

Free P0Rn and Sony Music is their next project.

[Anonymous Coward]

When pirated music is outlawed,
  then only outlaws will own music made by Pirates. "ARRrrggggg!"

If P0Rn is made into a massive free site, will that drive all the pay per view sites out of business?

Worst

[flyinwhitey]

first post ever.

..so we will now have Open Source Doctors ?

[managedcode]

I think their is an avid slashdot reader in Indian government who proposed this model.

Proof of Prior Art Made Easy

[Lonewolf666]

With the planned encyclopedia, proving prior art is easier because you just can point to the encyclopedia text.
Proving that a medicine is traditional should do the job as well, but may be somewhat more time-consuming because you will have to find sufficient witnesses.

open sourcing this knowledge

[kingduct]

I've argued that there ought to be some sort of free knowledge licence for this sort of stuff. It's great to develop new medicines, but if it is clearly based on existing knowledge or natural phenomena, it ought to have to be released for other people to study and improve. This is a major issue where I live (Ecuador), which is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, but the odds are that with the new Free Trade Treaty with the United States that surely will be signed, this country will basically have to allow American companies to control whatever IP they want.

No way...

[Nicolay77]

They already make shitloads of money.

They have medicines developed that could cure several forms of cancer.

They don't sell them because actually curing people from cancer is less profitable than actual treatments.

If the behavior of big multinational corporations were just a little different your point would be valid.

But as things go now, the Indians are right, and patents are wrong.

Re:Just STFU...

[Vicissidude]

As I said, "Yes, we should thank the Arabs for our numbering system." You can thank the Arabs for calculus. I'll continue thanking Isaac Newton who did the bulk of the work.

The FDA-USPTO complex

[tepples]

it's talking about patenting existing cures that use Indian plants.

Problem is that you can't market something as a treatment in the United States or other comparatively rich countries without running clinical trials and submitting a new drug application, and a drug company can't afford to do that without the promise of exclusive rights that last at least until most of the investment in clinical trials is paid off. If anything, you'll see these Indian products in the "dietary supplement" ghetto of your drugstore.

Give Caesar what is Caesar's (Luke 20:25)

[tepples]

The ownership of ideas is quite contrary to the Christian ethic.

Some would be inclined to agree, but on the other hand, what about "give Caesar what is Caesar's" (Luke 20:25; see also Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17), which some have read to encourage deference to man's law, however corrupt it may be, unless it directly contradicts God's law?

ObTopic: What do the Hindu texts have to say about this?

Re:Give Caesar what is Caesar's (Luke 20:25)

[griann]

Some would be inclined to agree, but on the other hand, what about "give Caesar what is Caesar's" (Luke 20:25; see also Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:13-17), which some have read to encourage deference to man's law, however corrupt it may be, unless it directly contradicts God's law?

Some might read these as deference to man's law, but I doubt you'll get any serious theologians in that mix. The KJB variant is along the lines of "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Render unto God, that which is God's."

Doesn't sound quite so deferential to me, in context. Sounds a little more about setting robust delineations. The "Lamb of God", for all the suggestions towards meekness, was not so meek himself. Let's also remember that the comment was made in reference to money (coins). Jesus noted Caesar's head embossed on the coin and uttered the comment. He was not seeking monetary wealth but the salvation of souls.

In this context, how would you spin his comments as being supportive of wealthy industrialists ripping off the cultural work of millenia in researching, reviewing and compiling (in written form in this case, let's not forget) comprehensive and detailed treatment methodologies and pharmacopeias by simply asserting that they should have sole rights to the tech developed by others? How do you spin this as being consistent with Christian values?

Not that I, personally, care about Christian values, but I am sickened by hypocrites.

I'm not suggesting that you agree with it, but, seriously, would you be convinced by such an argument? How narcissistically engaged with your own profit strategies would you have to be to cling to that?

Peace and all that goes with it. Okay?

Re:Just STFU...

[stupidslashdot]

Please get your facts right, the present numeral system along with 0 and decimal places was designed in India, by Hindus. It was transmitted to Europe thru Arabs.

More at Wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numerals and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals

Re:Just STFU...

[Vicissidude]

Wikipedia is hardly a good source of information givin the structure of the website. There, good writers are drowned out by persistent buffoons who don't always know what they're talking about or with an axe to grind. You end up with a consensus on an idea, but it is inevitably incorrect or biased in some way.

Re:Just STFU...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about records other than Wikipedia that state the same? Blaming Wikipedia's credibility is hardly an argument against the validity of the statements themselves.

Easy solution

[Weezul]

Change patents to 7 years from "hitting the market", or 1 year from filing if later, but make all products on the market first to be inherently non-infringing. Suppose that you file for a trivial patent, like "one-click" shopping. Your competitors now don't even need to challenge the patent, all they have to do it make their current product infringe before yours goes on the market, or within 1 year if you go to market quickly. You can't ever use that paent against them now. As a side note, patents without a marketable product would never become valid.

Patents exist to protect venture capitalists with vision, i.e. those who take real risks on products which might not even sell. Your patent is bad for society if your competitors immediately recognize it as a product worth bringing to market quickly (one year).