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.'"
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.
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.