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
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/
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.
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.
You just posted for the heck of it...didn't you. Such a insensitive comment gets to be modded funny is outrageous.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.... People doing good for others for altruistic purposes rather than profit?! How horible! I dunno, maybe those who seek to reap the benefits of such patents might have to work for a living like everyone else if that were to happen. That would be a terrible, terrible thing.
I definitely applaud this move. Patenting something that's been a known remedy for years - if not centuries, even - in India is like me patenting chamomile tea for soothing upset stomachs. Ridiculous, but is is happening, and I can see why they'd want to prevent any more of it from happening.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Hmmmmm. I wonder; isn't there a pretty heavy market in the relatively unregulated market of "supplements" and so forth? I don't think they're allowed to make specific claims about, say, curing diseases, lest they get treated as actual drugs, but that doesn't seem to stop people from buying gingseng and echinacea (sp?) and so forth.
The marketing would largely be word-of-mouth, perhaps supplemented by low-end cable and specific publications. If you're going to market random herbs or animal parts involved in Chinese folk medicine, for instance, a local vendor might consider putting an ad in a local Chinese-language newspaper and otherwise targeting the local Chinese immigrant community hoping to find customers who've kept with those customs. Perhaps one would also target the New Agers who readily turn to any and all forms of alternative medicine, although many would likely be a bit squeamish over the use of bears' gall bladders and so forth; and those other Westerners who've found Western medicine lacking for whatever reason. There's many who pay attention to more than just the latest ad blitz from Pfizer or whoever.
As a side note, I might suggest that there seems to be some audience for medical marijuana, even though it's not massively marketed or even legal (according to the Feds, anyway, and Federal jurisdiction over this hasn't been struck down AFAIK).
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
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: