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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.'"
After a while, doesn't making everything free kind of destroy the incentive for all but the most altrustic knowledge-seekers?
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
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.)
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
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.
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.
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!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
The article hopes to "curry" favour.... HAHA!
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
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.
enjoy life, and Gmail.pro
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.
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)
enjoy life, and Gmail.pro
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.
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?
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
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"!!!
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.
Welcome to slashdot! don't let the moderators grid you down.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Just poke'm in the eye with a sharp stick and forget about it.
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
You just posted for the heck of it...didn't you. Such a insensitive comment gets to be modded funny is outrageous.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
If progress is made, government should reward it by......... letting the person make money off of it without everyone else directly ripping him off!
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.
My sig has been answered.
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.
Traditional doesn't mean "affordable" ..in fact given the super low per capita GDP .. 60 years sounds like a very high number.
.. 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.
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
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.
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?
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
> 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.
Advanced users are users too!
They should outsource that data entry.
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.
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).
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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
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:
first post ever.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
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.
I think their is an avid slashdot reader in Indian government who proposed this model.
In short, with completely inane patents on turmeric, it is you who are "stealing" intellectual property from us.
More than mere navel gazing.
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
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.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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).
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell