India Moves to Protect Traditional Knowledge from Foreign IP Claims

India has launched an ambitious, multilingual project to protect centuries-old traditional knowledge from foreign patent claimants. Christened the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, the project will be a massive digital encyclopedia of herbal remedies, indigenous architecture and construction techniques, Indian foods, yoga exercises and other ancient lore. In the past decade, the Indian government has fought several costly legal battles against foreign patent and other intellectual property claims over traditional knowledge, including a US patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric, a patent related to the Basmati rice line, and a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent Office against a patent granted for an anti-fungal product derived from the neem tree. Normally, a patent application will be rejected if previously existing knowledge about the applications of a product prove the claim is not novel. However, patent offices typically only assert prior art if they can show it is published. It is difficult to find and prove traditional knowledge passed down orally or contained in ancient and relatively inaccessible texts, so patent offices have difficulty rejecting claims to that knowledge. The clash of traditional knowledge and Western intellectual property regimes is not limited to patent law. The Basmati rice case also invoked geographic indications and, in 2004, the US granted a copyright on a sequence of 26 5000-year-old asanas, or yoga exercises. The Indian government hopes that the recording and disclosure of traditional knowledge will foreclose future claims. This may also provide a rich resource for searchers. For two articles on the topic, visit: http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p07s02-wosc.html; and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4506382.stm For a critique of Western intellectual property norms applied to traditional knowledge, see: http://ssrn.com/abstract=507302 Summary by: Jason Young