Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.)
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.
You! Yes, YOU! Out of the gene pool!
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
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).
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
You just posted for the heck of it...didn't you. Such a insensitive comment gets to be modded funny is outrageous.
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
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.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
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.
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: