India's OA Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is making good on its plan to share its contents with patent offices around the world in order to establish prior art and invalidate bogus patents. See yesterday's press release from the Indian government:
India through an Access Agreement with European Patent Office, has established a mechanism to protect India’s traditional medicinal knowledge from bio-piracy. The maiden Indian effort in creating ‘Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) database would now be available to the Patent Examiners at European Patent Office (EPO having 34 member states) for establishing prior art, in case of patent applications based on Indian systems of medicine. The accessibility of data base has come into operation from February 2, 2009....
This first such agreement would provide cover against infringement of country’s rich traditional medicinal heritage having huge economic potential, of the kind that was witnessed during the last decade, including grant of wrong patents on wound healing properties of turmeric (1995) at the United States Patent & Trade Mark Office (USPTO) and on anti-fungal properties of Neem granted at European Patent Office (EPO)....
The grant of these patents in United States and Europe were the cause of great national distress, since, every Indian felt that the knowledge that belonged to India were wrongfully taken away from India. Further, the patents would have conferred exclusive rights on the use of technology to the applicant of the patent in the country in which it has been granted....
The TKDL expert group estimated that about 2000 number of wrong patents concerning Indian systems of medicine were being granted every year at international level, mainly due to the fact that, India’s traditional medicine knowledge exists in languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Tamil etc. and was neither accessible nor understood by patent examiners at the international patent offices due to language and format barriers.
The TKDL breaks these barriers and has been able to scientifically convert and structure the information available in languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil, in open domain text books into five international languages, namely, English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish, with information contents in 30 million A4 size pages, with the help of Information Technology tools and a novel classification system - Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC)....
On an average it takes five to seven years for opposing a granted patent at international level, which may cost Rs one to three crores (0.2-0.6 million US$). Therefore, the cost of protecting two lakh (0.2 million US$) medicinal formulations, in the absence of TKDL, would be staggering and completely unaffordable....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
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