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.'"
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.
-- Alastair
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?
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
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
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.
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.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
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.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
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).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
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.