Traditional Knowledge Digital Library
India’s anti bio-piracy initiative has garnered a lot of press recently. Here is the BBC:
In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying in information.
… The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia 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.
You can access a demo of the TKDL here, but I think you need to work at a patent office to register. The concept of bio-piracy is explained in detail on this page, along with several examples. Here is the BBC’s summary:
In 1995, the US Patent Office granted a patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric.
Indian scientists protested and fought a two-year-long legal battle to get the patent revoked.
Last year, India won a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent Office against a patent granted on an anti-fungal product, derived from neem, by successfully arguing that the medicinal neem tree is part of traditional Indian knowledge.
In 1998 the US Patent Office granted patent to a local company for new strains of rice similar to basmati, which has been grown for centuries in the Himalayan foothills of north-west India and Pakistan and has become popular internationally. After a prolonged legal battle, the patent was revoked four years ago.
And, in the US, an expatriate Indian yoga teacher has claimed copyright on a sequence of 36 yoga asanas, or postures. [I think they are referring to this.]
There is more information about bio-piracy on the Who Owns Native Culture website.
It would have been nice if they’d entered all this information into a more user friendly and accessible format, like a wiki, rather than a database for corporate lawyers, but perhaps that can be done later.
P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.
