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Patents Science

India Hits Back in 'Bio-Piracy' Battle 190

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the prior-body-art dept.
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.'"
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India Hits Back in 'Bio-Piracy' Battle More

India Hits Back in 'Bio-Piracy' Battle

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  • After a while, doesn't making everything free kind of destroy the incentive for all but the most altrustic knowledge-seekers?

    • Re:Information is great and all, but (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:08PM (#14204678)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <circletimessquar ... m ['gma' in gap]> on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:10PM (#14204698) Homepage Journal
      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
    • After a while, doesn't making everything free kind of destroy the incentive for all but the most altrustic knowledge-seekers?

      I must have said this a hundred times before, but usually nobody replies.

      Usually I'm taking about why sharing music files IS theft, which naturally changes EVERYTHING for some reason I can't fully understand.
      • 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.
        • 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:Information is great and all, but (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No, rather it makes the execution and support of free ideas what is worth paying for, rather than the ideas themselves.
    • 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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Malc ( 1751 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:18PM (#14204762)
      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.
    • Yes yes, knowledge is a limited resource, kinda like oil I guess. Give it up capitalist, there is no end to knowledge, it just builds on itself.
    • Information can be useful.

    • 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

    • 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

  • Futile? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:06PM (#14204657) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:46PM (#14204960)
      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.

    • 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?
    • India got a patent on turmeric, used in curries, revoked
      Somebody want to hunt down that patent? I would love to know how that worked.

  • Hasn't stopped anyone yet (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Havenwar ( 867124 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:09PM (#14204688)
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by vijaya_chandra ( 618284 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:20PM (#14204773)
      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.
      • Well, I am glad that things are not quite as depressing as I see them. At least some people stand up against patenting. I find it quite hilarious though that in the article you linked they claim it was piracy to file a patent for somethign already known, while usually the only piracy peopel mention is when something patented is recreated by others without licensing.

        Nah, I do believe patenting it self is the thing to blame for this and many other problems.

  • Who's the victim? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by castoridae ( 453809 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:13PM (#14204726)
    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 is more a matter of principle - how can someone brand something that has existed for thousands of years as their own invention/discovery? its not like they invented it themselves - most of the time they are copying it from an already existing text, with a little modification here and there. doesnt matter if it affects indian citizens or not.... and not to mention that no credit is given to the ancient indians who actually discovered the cures....
      • I think it DOES matter if it affects Indian citizens. There are an awful lot of problems that DO affect them every day - and these are better problems to spend resources on (from the Indian gov'ts POV. From other gov't POV, fine this is good as a mis-issued patent could cost their citizens $$).

        As far as the ancient Indians... somehow, I don't think they really mind.
    • 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? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As previously mentioned, both basmati and the "Tree of Life" have been patented.
      If the company which owns the patent does not want the Indian population to use their patented technology, they can file a claim with the WTO. As a member of the WTO, the Indian gov't is required to stop illegal patent use.

      What should the Indian gov't do at this point?

      Please open your eyes about reality before you post from your valley of ignorance.

      Look up and read some of the writings of Arundhati Roy, and listen to Democracy

    • Re:Who's the victim? (Score:5, Informative)

      by terrymr ( 316118 ) <terrymr@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @04:12PM (#14205174)
      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]
      • Thank you for posting that article. I found it very interesting.

      • aka Open source project patented, users sued (Score:4, Informative)

        by geekotourist ( 80163 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @07:05PM (#14206375) Journal
        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.
    • You're forgetting companies in India that want to export medicines based off of those patents. They'll be locked out of the most lucrative markets.

        -Charles

  • That's good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrRay720 ( 874710 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:15PM (#14204737)
    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.
    • 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.
    • 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
      • The problem is it takes a lot of money and time to extract these secrets from nature.

        You miss the point. The register intends to record traditional cures and remedies. The effort to extract these secrets from nature has been made by people a long time ago, and the register tries to ensure that nobody tries to claim that effort as their own. There indeed is no free ride.

        • Re:That's good (Score:3, Interesting)

          by 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:That's good (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sid1234 ( 937007 )
      Well ya, no one is patenting because they know what turmeric or neem is. They are patenting the fact that they know how to extract biproducts from them to effectively treat some thing. This is not directly available in nature and hence deserves a patent. The point is you need to know how to use it and when and where to use it and what aspect it cures. This is why every Big pharma company spends so many million $$$ to research to find out, because its about health and if some side effects are there they wil

  • Culture and medicine! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mister_llah ( 891540 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:16PM (#14204744) Homepage Journal
    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!
  • 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 pa
    • 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)

  • Public Domain (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:19PM (#14204770) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tim2005 ( 924108 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:21PM (#14204780)
    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.

    • you live in a different world, in india people dont spend 800 million to create a mint pill that soothes a tender tummy.

    • Re:Is this a good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Forbman ( 794277 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:33PM (#14204870)
      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).
      • I hope the AC who made this comment will forgive me for quoting him (I wanted to make sure it was heard): "Sorry, you need to read "Prevention" Magazine. It's for people who want "natural" remedies, but they're the first ones to say that 90% of the "herbal" remedies are fraudulent." This really does get a the crux of the issue. A good chunk of the money that is spent on a drug development involves insuring its effectiness and safety. This means large clinical trials involving thousands of patients, hund
      • 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 f
    • 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.

      • This is not quite true. A substance that exists in a usable form in nature is not patentable. Likewise, methods to extract substances from plants, or extracted substances that are known and used, are also not patentable.

        But improvements such as extracting and refining a substance from a plant, so that it's usable in a pure form, as opposed to a mixture or an adulterated form as found in the plant, IS patentable. In general, this is the sort of thing that companies are doing. (There are also cases where

    • Re:Is this a good thing? (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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
      • "That's a problem with the approval process, which the pharma companies obviously like since it's a huge barrier to entry. "

        That's absurd. Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.

        The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug development cycle. They hate that it costs so much and takes so long. If it were to cost less they would make, much, much, more money.
        • To take a contrarian view...

          Every day a drug spends in development averages out to $1 million dollars in lost revenue before the drug goes off patent.

          Why is the lost revenue that large? Because they're able to charge so much for the drugs they develop. Why are they able to charge so much? Because their development and regulatory costs are so high as to reduce effective competition.

          The drug companies invest tens of billions and are working day night to figure out new ways to shorten the drug develop

    • 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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by pfafrich ( 647460 ) <rich&singsurf,org> on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @03:43PM (#14204944) Homepage
    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).
  • 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.
    • 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 (Score:2)

      by 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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ilex ( 261136 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @04:12PM (#14205175)
    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 [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

  • Great effort (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lovesinghal ( 734189 )
    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

    • Re:Great effort (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Stonehand ( 71085 )
      The good thing about natural medicines is that they do not have side effects.

      That's a hell of an assertion to make.

      I could suggest quite a variety of completely natural substances that would have remarkably deleterious effects when taken (in)appropriately. From plants, there's interesting chemicals in foxglove, belladonna, many mushrooms such as cheerfully named "Angel of Death", bitter almonds... And if we expand it to animals, their are numerous animals making quite effective poisons and venoms. Sea s

  • My Interview (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Milo Fungus ( 232863 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @04:57PM (#14205588)

    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!

  • 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.

    • You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare" languages. Hindi [ethnologue.com] has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit [ethnologue.com] has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.) Tamil [ethnologue.com] has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.

  • Finally, a correct use of the word "Piracy" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by yeremein ( 678037 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2005 @06:55PM (#14206322)
    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.
  • 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 witho

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