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.'"

Futile?

[AJWM (19027)]

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.

Why the USPTO is so bad

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

I have approx ten patents (over the last 15 years or so) and it seems to me that it is easier to get a crappy patent through now than ever before. The USPTO have got to be like this because of various factors.

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.

Re:Why the USPTO is so bad

[IAmTheDave (746256)]

Don't forget that getting a patent overturned is an incredibly expensive proposition, costing much more than getting the original patent. More money for lawyers.

Re:Futile?

[drinkypoo (153816)]

What might you find? That a government institution funded by patent applications is, indeed, going to be running slipshod over their purpose and mandate?

Hasn't stopped anyone yet

[Havenwar (867124)]

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.

Re:Hasn't stopped anyone yet

[vijaya_chandra (618284)]

Some people'd definitely take the trouble (especially when some huge company with excess of money's gonna start charging licensing fees from you for all kinds of stupid things)
Check this out
http://www.hindu.com/2005/03/09/stories/2005030902 381300.htm [hindu.com]

In this particular case along with saying - uhm, we knew that.... they'd shown proof of people using the technique from a long time also though.

Who's the victim?

[castoridae (453809)]

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.

Re:Who's the victim?

[drinkypoo (153816)]

Actually, China is least likely to be affected by this kind of crap, because they give not one fuck about foreign patents. I'd like to see India go the same way, though...

Re:Who's the victim?

[terrymr (316118)]

Yeah well imagine the surprise of people living in India when they found their rice and spices had been patented by US Corporations and were facing demands for vastly overpriced seeds in order to continue growing what they had for hundreds of years.

Anc check out Iraq's new seed patent laws : http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=6 [grain.org]

aka Open source project patented, users sued

[geekotourist (80163)]

Another example is the Enola yellow bean [biotech-info.net], where an American company got a patent on a bean they'd bought from Mexican bean farmers. They then sued those farmers exporting yellow beans into the US.

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 [slashdot.org] or Open Source Biotechnology [slashdot.org], I wrote about some problems with proprietary aka closed hood genetics in food production [slashdot.org]:

• Specific problems solved by genetic engineering can also be solved in other ways. Word isn't the only way to write a document. Golden rice isn't the only way to get more vitamin A to people.
• Opportunity Costs- what do you lose if you spend a big chunk of money on a single proprietary solution? You lose flexibility. Continuing with Golden Rice: sure, its gets people more vitamin A. But if instead you spend the same money to give people wider access to vitamin-rich veggies you *also* give them more of the other vitamins and phytochemicals that we've selected for in those veggies for 3000+ years.
• The food itself is secondary to locking you into a company's support products and support cycle. The problem that Montanto is trying to solve isn't "how can farmers improve crop yields and reduce weeds?" Monsanto's problem is "How can we lock farmers into using our weedkillers?"
• The proprietary product is often based on (taken from / stolen from) older open source projects.
• they're closed source, top-down implementations that lead to monocultures. For example: Andean potato farmers- they developed hundreds of different potato varieties over the years: buttery tasting ones, meaty tasting ones, ones that grow in drought / shade / various altitudes... and these potatoes could be susceptible to a particular pest (quite likely one or more of their varieties already had resistance: smart breeding is how you'd get that trait out from the one potato into the rest). A major North American company came in saying "Hey, our potato + pesticide combination is resistant to the pest. Buy both from us, then you'll have no problems. By the way our potato is patented- don't think about crossbreeding it." At the same time they launched a major advertising (FUD) campaign in major potato buying markets saying "Hey, our potato is the best most modern potato. Don't buy anything else." So farmers couldn't just patch their own potatoes- they had to buy into the product / product cycle upgrade of the NA company. Sounds familiar?
• they have all or nothing security models (they focus on zero tolerance for weeds / pests: in the long run this will be more expensive than "accept a marginal and mildly fluctuating loss" as they learned with citrus pests in California and Florida)
• They break standards. For example, BT is a bacteria /toxin used by organic farmers for decades to kill certain insect pests. At the previous rate of use- as a spray- there was a very, very low probability of insects developing resistance. Decades of use hadn't produced it. Now that BT has been spliced into crop plants, the widespread planting of monocultures of BT crops means BT resistance is increasingly likely. As this happens the non-organic farmers can move onto other pesticides. But the organic farmers whose old standard- BT sprays- will also become useless have no backup. There was no system set up to compensate these farmers from their soon to be broken standard. Nor was their any "royalty" paid to these farmers who'd discovered BT in the first place.

That's good

[mrRay720 (874710)]

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.

Re:That's good

[wk633 (442820)]

As much as I agree with you A world where you can infringe on a patent merely by being born? is overreaching. I think genetic patents are bad, but you don't infringe them by simply having the patented gene. The patent is on a process involving knowledge of what the gene does, not simply having the gene in your dna.

Re:That's good

[lawpoop (604919)]

The problem is it takes a lot of money and time to extract these secrets from nature. So if it takes $30 million and 10 years research to figure out how to get something useful from a plant, and then as soon as you come out with it someone rips you off?

These people aren't just cherry-picking money from nature. That's why they want patent protectiong. They do want to make money, but it takes a *lot* of money and probably decades up front before you start making money off of it. There really is no free rid

Re:That's good

[lawpoop (604919)]

Unfortuneately, it doesn't work like that. I have a Bachelor's in anthropology and I focused on ethnobotany.

What this database will probably give you is some thing like:

Creeping Treeclimber aphorensis creepius

• Used by the BthongaThonga people in an admixture of 50+ other plants said to be helpful against spirit posession.
• Merck scientists derived a compound from it that was effective in a cell culture of non-hodgekin's lymphoma.

Now, did the BthongaThonga people really discover the cure for non-Hod

Re:Extreme capitalism?

[jonnythan (79727)]

If progress is made, government should reward it by......... letting the person make money off of it without everyone else directly ripping him off!

Culture and medicine!

[mister_llah (891540)]

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!

Public Domain

[GillBates0 (664202)]

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.

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.

Is this a good thing?

[Tim2005 (924108)]

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.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Forbman (794277)]

But it won't stop all the vitamin and herbal remedy people from picking them up and selling them, albeit without the mantle of the FDA saying that they are useful for anything or as part of any treatment.

Research *will* be done on these folk remedies, and any glimmer of efficacy revealed by these small-scale studies will be trounced upon by the herbal remedy companies as facts that the stuff is "good" for something.

Just because Abbott Laboratories, Glaxo, Lilly, Novaris, et al. don't pick up on them, doesn't mean that someone won't.

And, if a compound in some herbal remedy is finally isolated that actually does do things well, if a company like the above can make a synthetic analogue which it can patent (the process to make it and derivatives, not necessarily the compound in and of itself), it will invest the $$$ to run traditional medical trials and get an FDA-approved product.

Basically, if it's a useful compound like digitoxin or curare, it will eventually be used when a "legitimate" pharma makes it and it becomes FDA-approved in a given treatment protocol.

After all, Wrigley Gum doesn't make Nicorette (even though it easily could. They'd just have to source out the nicotine used in it), but one of the Pharmas does, because Nicorette is a drug delivery device..

If someone figured out how to put a pediatric medicine into Pez tablets, do you think the candy company that makes Pez would make it? Nope. One of the Pharmas would (it'd be a drug delivery device).

Re:Is this a good thing?

[wk633 (442820)]

The article isn't talking about research based on Indian plants, it's talking about patenting existing cures that use Indian plants. Nobody is inventing anything new. They're taking things that people have been doing for thousands of years, and claiming them as new discoveries of their own.

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Kaa (21510)]

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 mea

Re:Is this a good thing?

[jonbryce (703250)]

But these drugs have already been developed, and have been in use for thousands of years.

Patenting these drugs is not going to incentivise Indian scientists from thousands of years ago to invent more of them.

Of course, if someone were to come up with a new and non-obvious treatment based on one of these drugs, they could patent that, but not the original drug it was based on.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Databas

[pfafrich (647460)]

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 [aaas.org] or (T.E.K.* P.A.D.). (disclaimer I've contributed a large dataset to this database).

Cochrane Library and SK has them beat

[saskboy (600063)]

http://www.thecochranelibrary.com/ [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.

Re:Cochrane Library and SK has them beat

[shdragon (1797)]

The Indian project is about putting traditional (called "alternative" in the west) medicine online, not putting Western medicine knowledge online. That's been done for awhile now. These are traditional Indian medicines and knowledge passed down through oral & folk tradition. The primary reason behind this is US & EU companies gaining patents for things which prior art exists but is not easily findable or searchable in the West.

Um no

[g8oz (144003)]

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.

Divine right

[Ilex (261136)]

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.

it's the movement that counts

[escay (923320)]

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 [wikipedia.org], 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 patenti

My Interview

[Milo Fungus (232863)]

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 [amazon.com] 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!

Finally, a correct use of the word "Piracy"

[yeremein (678037)]

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.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[by Anonymous Coward]

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?

you're correct

[circletimessquare (444983)]

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

Re:Information is great and all, but

[AJWM (19027)]

So what if it does? We have no shortage of altruistic knowledge-seekers, especially if the chilling effect of potential lawsuits by greedy knowledge seekers is reduced.

But whether it does or doesn't, that's irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is discussing trying to prevent the lock-up or proprietization of knowledge which is already free and has been for hundreds of years.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Malc (1751)]

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.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Mistshadow2k4 (748958)]

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. Ridiculou

Re:Information is great and all, but

[jonbryce (703250)]

These are things that have *already* been invented, and were invented without the need for patents, or perhaps even because the lack of patents meant that these people could build existing knowledge without having to get someone else's permission, and without having to pay a lawyer to get it through the courts.

Most of the time, the US believes that the free market, free of government interference is the best way forward, and I totally agree. Even, or especially where the development of knowledge and ideas

Re:Information is great and all, but

[Digital Vomit (891734)]

No.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Most people say that downloading music files isn't theft. It's breach of copyright, but it isn't theft. Theft has certain legal meanings. People don't want it being called theft, because it isn't. It is copyright infringement though, and most people can't make up a reasonable argument that it is not. The real question is, is whether or not this copyright infringement is moral.

Re:Information is great and all, but

[SolemnDragon (593956)]

i think (disclaimer: i am not an economist, and haven't balanced my chequebook in long enough that any financial advisement from me should inspire skepticism, at best) that making everything free doesn't destroy business in the traditional healer realm- how much interest in tourism, etc, will be drummed up by having this cultural background available for people to peruse? Completely aside from any medical value the therapies may or may not have, this is interesting from a cultural standpoint, and for that

Re:India?

[TheLoneDanger (611268)]

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

Re:India?

[SmellTheCoffee (808375)]

You just posted for the heck of it...didn't you. Such a insensitive comment gets to be modded funny is outrageous.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[anonicon (215837)]

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

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[mrokkam (783202)]

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 [rediff.com] (long grained rice from India and Pakistan), turmeric [twnside.org.sg] (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

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Stonehand (71085)]

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).

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

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.

Music CDs dont cure diseases

[absinthminded64 (883630)]

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?

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[das_cookie (619577)]

If these are traditional medicine, nobody can patent it because of prior art, and whoever claims it will not stand long in the court.

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 fo

You misunderstand

[Lifewish (724999)]

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.

Re:Piracy Made Easy?

[whitehatlurker (867714)]

TFA saith:

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.

Re:Free Market

[Stonehand (71085)]

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 i