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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?
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
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
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"!!!