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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.'"
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
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
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.