Code Swaraj
and its administration.” India was justifiably outraged. After a great deal of effort led by Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, the Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, which runs the big national research laboratories in India, the patent was revoked.
Another patent was issued on basmati rice, which has been grown for millenia in Bengal. The patent was based on cross-breeding basmati rice with dwarf varieties of rice to create a sturdier plant. This is of course not an innovation as farmers all over India had been cross-breeding rice for just that purpose for centuries. Not only that, the patent included the word “Basmati” and could have conceivably led to causes of action against farmers using the word!
With the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the international community recognized that patents that are based on traditional knowledge should not be the province of a few western corporate biopirates, appropriating knowledge that had been known in local communities for ages. The Convention encourages countries to put in place national laws, and India enacted the Biodiversity Act of 2002. One of the key principles of both the Convention and the Act is that western corporations should not profit exclusively off the knowledge of local communities, but should share the profits.
If indeed a patent is issued on traditional knowledge, I fully agree the profits should be shared. Additionally, if widespread harvesting of biological material occurs in a local area, based on an awareness from traditional sources of particular therapeutic effects, that patent should also have the profits shared with local communities. The Biodiversity Act enshrines those principles.
Here’s my problem though. Most, if not all, of the patents that were awarded, from turmeric to basmati rice and many, many more, were (to use a technical term of art) totally bogus. They shouldn’t have been issued. And even more such bad patents continue to be issued! The theory behind the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is that patent examiners will use it to find such cases and prevent bad patents from issuing in the first place. The Digital Library has agreements in place with the U.S. and European Union patent offices, and I fully support the idea that their patent examiners should be using this database on a regular basis. This is a positive thing.
But, some people believe making the database available on a wider basis would somehow be bad because it would make this knowledge available for bad corporations to take advantage of. That same trepidation was behind the worries about putting TDU’s database online. I don't understand that line of reasoning.
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