When you want your knowledge to be freely available, how do you keep other people from claiming it as their own? NewsHour rebroadcast an interesting segment tonight about India's efforts to protect and preserve its traditional knowledge. The problem starts when people patent or copyright ancient methods, such as yoga positions or medicinal uses of spices. More than 2,000 patents per year are awarded on tricks such as using turmeric for healing wounds.
In 1997, a Texas company got a patent on basmati rice, which meant that it would get a royalty payment when anyone else sold rice by that name. The Indian government filed 50,000 pages of evidence to show that basmati rice grown in India for centuries was essentially the same stuff. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office finally revoked the basmati patent in 2001.
At the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, which began in 2002, Indian scholars catalog ancient manuscripts on medical knowledge, architecture, music and the arts, to digitize 5,000 years of knowledge—an estimated 30 million pages—into a multilingual database that can be more easily referenced by international patent offices checking on the validity of filed claims.
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