[Commons-Law] India At The Forefront Of Knowledge Commons Debate

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Interesting report.

Made me totally confused about what does `protection of the commons`  
mean? Protection by whom?

The report gives names of many people saying very different and  
contradictory things. Can anybody illuminate me on this.

best
jeebesh


On 05-Sep-06, at 1:21 PM, Venkatesh Hariharan wrote:

> India At The Forefront Of Knowledge Commons Debate
>
> http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=389&res=1680_ff&print=0
> By Frederick Noronha for Intellectual Property Watch
>
> NEW DELHI - What do seeds have in common with software? Or age-old  
> medicines with copyright lawyers? And, what's the link between  
> ayurvedic medicines and techies talking free software in Bangalore?
>
> Such issues are getting closely enmeshed in a deepening debate on  
> how knowledge is shared or controlled in this new information- 
> dominated century. This is a debate of vital relevance for a  
> country that is making an increasingly visible global impact  
> through its brain power, and yet has among the most impressive  
> collections of traditional medicines and knowledge.
>
> Diverse views surface on how such issues should be tackled, as was  
> strongly obvious at a 24-25 August "knowledge symposium" held at  
> New Delhi. The invite-only meet was organised by the open source  
> software firm Red Hat (India) and the Indian Institute of  
> Technology New Delhi.
>
> The event brought these diverse strands together while focusing on  
> what it said were alternative ways of looking at sharing knowledge  
> and concepts like intellectual property.
>
> India's Big Stakes
>
> India has big stakes in this debate. It is home to vast amounts of  
> traditional knowledge - traditional systems of medicine and  
> healthcare, like Yoga, Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha (both systems of  
> medicine), traditional agriculture, and more.
>
> But the planet's second-most populous country also faces the  
> dilemma of getting global acceptability on intellectual property  
> issues as it integrates growingly with the global economy.
> Physicist, eco-feminist, environmental activist and author Vandana  
> Shiva was one of the articulate voices that sought to bring the  
> diverse strands of the debate together.
>
> "I'm happy to join those of you working to defend the commons in  
> the field of knowledge," said Shiva, alluding to knowledge  
> typically available in the public domain. Shiva, who has fought for  
> changes in India's agriculture and food sector for over two  
> decades, spoke on 'Nurturing India's Traditional Knowledge'.
>
> "What [freely available and IP-unencumbered] open source software  
> is to IT [information technology], open pollinated seeds are to the  
> agricultural commons. These are the same things," she said. "Since  
> the past 20 years, I've started to save seeds and create community  
> seed banks."
>
> She argued: "Biodiversity, traditional knowledge and agriculture  
> are matters of life and death [in countries like India], depending  
> on whether resources and knowledge are in the commons, or they are  
> in privatised property."
>
> Shiva pointed to the importance of traditional knowledge,  
> especially in the fields of agriculture, nutrition and healthcare.  
> "In this country, we have rice varieties that are taller than this  
> room…," she said in the chandeliered conference room of a luxury  
> hotel. "That helps them to tolerate floods. By just moving the  
> gene, it doesn't mean that some scientist has invented any gene. It  
> is in the commons," she added.
>
> In a long and hard-hitting speech, the author of titles such as  
> "The Violence of Green Revolution" and "Monocultures of the Mind"  
> spoke about how traditional knowledge like yoga or ecological  
> farming was being denied its "status as knowledge on a yardstick of  
> Cartesian reductionist knowledge".
>
> She noted the diversification of contemporary knowledge, the  
> difficulty of slotting part of it under 'the scientific approach',  
> and charged that traditional knowledge is getting "ghettoised as if  
> it wasn't a science".
>
> Who Shall Own India's Ancient Wisdom?
>
> Others initiatives related to India's traditional knowledge also  
> were discussed at the meeting. One such initiative is TKDL, an  
> acronym for the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. This Indian  
> government initiative based in New Delhi is aimed at building a  
> database of traditional knowledge that "enables the protection of  
> such information from getting misappropriated."
>
> Since an interdisciplinary team began work in October 2001, the  
> TKDL has completed the transcription of 36,000 ayurvedic  
> formulations into English, German, French, Spanish and Japanese. It  
> made a presentation at the International Patent Classification  
> Union in Geneva in the past.
>
> TKDL Director Dr. V. K. Gupta said at the conference: "TKDL deals  
> with traditional knowledge and the issue of patents. We're not  
> focused on getting patents, but on preventing its misappropriation."
>
> "Knowledge from the fields of [Indian systems of medicine like]  
> Ayurveda or Siddha are very well documented. But the problem is  
> that of language. This knowledge is documented in languages like  
> Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, or Persian. Books about them are not  
> available at international patent offices. So, there's no  
> understanding [about how ancient this knowledge really is]," said  
> Gupta.
>
> Gupta pointed out that if anything is pre-known, then existing  
> intellectual property rights (IPR) laws do not allow it to be  
> patented. "A majority of the patents [taken on Indian knowledge] is  
> by expatriate Indians or multinational corporations. There are  
> about 2,000 patents which have been wrongly issued, in our view.  
> Each takes 11 years to fight. How do you resolve this problem?" he  
> asked.
>
> So TKDL's approach is to document traditional knowledge. "We've  
> done it for around 70,000 formulations in Ayurveda, and some more  
> in the Unani and Siddha," he added. TKDL's team of a hundred  
> persons have been working on this for the past five years.
>
> Past Attempts to Patent Indian Products
>
> Attempts have been made - not always unsuccessfully - to get  
> patents related to Indian products, such as Basmati rice (widely  
> grown in the Himalayan foothills), and India-derived lower-gluten  
> genetically modified wheat strains. There was also a patent on Neem  
> (a long-used tree sometimes called the "village pharmacy")  
> challenged by environmental groups, and one on the use of turmeric  
> for treating illness (used for centuries in India).
>
> Patents were also sought on Psyllium husk (called Isabgol, in  
> India) – for reducing cholesterol, improving bowel movements,  
> purposes for which it has been traditionally used in India. Fennel  
> (saunf, by its Indian name), coriander (dhania), cumin (jeera) and  
> sunflower products and properties also attracted patents, a  
> development which evokes laughs in India, considering that these  
> items have been so long used for such purposes here.
>
> Trade and IPR as 'War by Other Means'
>
> "You must make sense of IPR in its context. Trade needs to be seen  
> as a continuation of war by other means," said Prabir Purkayastha  
> of the Delhi Science Forum.
>
> Mr Purkayastha's view is shared by people of other ideologies in a  
> country like India which feels it has not gained its fair share for  
> centuries out of global trade deals. India's current government  
> also carries with it a significant influence of the Communist  
> parties, if only because it lacks a majority on its own in the  
> parliament.
>
> Prithviraj Chauhan, Indian minister of state attached to the Prime  
> Minister's office, told the meet that India is "keeping up to" its  
> World Trade Organization obligations. But, he hastened to add: "The  
> open source community is performing a historic role, by reversing  
> that which has commercialised and [trends which have] priced all  
> information."
>
> Former nuclear scientist and fellow of the Third World Academy of  
> Sciences (Trieste) Dr. V. S. Ramamurthy argued: "India has a long  
> tradition of an intellectual property protection regime, however  
> weak it was. The first Indian patent laws were promulgated (during  
> the British rule) in 1856. After independence, new patent laws were  
> put in place in the form of the Indian Patent Act 1970."
>
> Ramamurthy is the chair of the board that controls India's  
> prestigious IIT technological training institutions, that has  
> created many top technologists for global industry. But, he said,  
> while India had joined all international negotiations there "are  
> discomforts" domestically.
>
> Scientists Historically Resist Patents not in the Public Interest
>
> "A significant number of people, both within the scientific  
> community and outside, believe that today's strategy in handling  
> intellectual property assets is flawed," Ramamurthy said. "It is  
> against the traditional belief that knowledge is a public property,  
> particularly knowledge for public good."
>
> Ramamurthy went on to cite the case of Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose,  
> India's physicist who pioneered the investigation of radio and  
> microwave optics. "His reluctance to any form of patenting is well  
> known. It was contained in his letter to (Indian Nobel laureate)  
> Rabindranath Tagore dated May 17, 1901 from London."
>
> "It was not that Sir Bose was unaware of patents and its  
> advantages. He was the first Indian to get a US Patent (No. 755840)  
> in 1904. And Sir Bose was not alone in his avowed reluctance to  
> patenting. Roentgen, Pierre Curie and many others also chose the  
> path of no patenting on moral grounds," said the former atomic  
> scientist.
>
> What Model is Best for India?
>
> There's also anger over some recent developments. Red Hat India's  
> Venkatesh Hariharan pointed to attempts to patent yogic postures,  
> under the name of Bikram Yoga, in the United States recently. "When  
> asked, why he was doing it, the expatriate Indian's answer was,  
> 'This is the American way of life'," Hariharan said.
>
> "These are models that we need to look at. Is that kind of model  
> applicable to India?" Hariharan said. "If we [in India] had  
> patented the zero, what would have happened to the world of IT?  
> Would one of the most famous person in the world of IT have had so  
> many 'zeroes' behind his net worth?"
>
> Shiva herself argues: "Ideas used by Microsoft and Monsanto cause  
> despair across the globe. You need to give justice to farmers, not  
> push them to extinction." She spoke of the growing cases of farmer  
> suicides in central India, many hundred cases each year, believed  
> to be caused by their financial distress.
>
> In Shiva's view, the patent regimes are based on an assumption that  
> the only incentive for human beings is making money. But others,  
> like the young Indian lawyer of Chinese descent, Lawrence Liang,  
> see the issue differently. Liang believes that the "first  
> generation" of critical scholarship on intellectual property in  
> India "emerged in the context of biodiversity and traditional  
> knowledge, which has a nationalist twist to it". He sees this  
> emerging from "an older debate around Western modernity versus  
> tradition, and Western epistemology versus the indigenous context."
>
> What Way Forward?
>
> Liang points out that Indian campaigners like Shiva, Suman Sahai,  
> and Darshan Shankar have done work on biodiversity. But, he feels,  
> these debates remain dependent on the discourse of development,  
> pitting developing versus developed countries. It responds to a  
> "crisis of property," and, in Liang's view, seeks a "strengthening  
> of property rights within a nationalist model."
>
> Others like legal consultant Sudhir Krishnaswamy suggested that  
> there was a contradiction in the way India was trying to defend its  
> traditional knowledge. While multinational corporations were being  
> criticised, the solution proposed was to make the national  
> government even stronger, he noted. This led to disastrous  
> consequences, for instance when the government took control of the  
> forests, Krishnaswamy said.
>
> Dr. Satyanarayan "Sam" Pitroda, an expatriate Indian who now heads  
> the national Knowledge Commission, talks about creating the  
> building blocks for new knowledge creation from India. His focus is  
> less on how to retain control over traditional knowledge.
>
> Professor Anil Gupta, the editor of the 17-year-old HoneyBee  
> magazine, highlights issues of traditional knowledge in distant  
> places like Argentina. His view is that this knowledge needs to be  
> protected by defensive patents favouring the villagers and  
> communities that created it.
>
> But pointing to contemporary issues including pesticides allegedly  
> entering Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola in India, due to the excessive  
> use of agricultural chemicals, and the death of its traditional  
> form, Shiva stressed her point. "If you force computer users to pay  
> royalties to Microsoft… or if you force farmers to pay royalties to  
> Monsanto, it is violative of the [Indian] Constitution," she said.
>
> And Shiva sent out a loud message as she concluded: "Thank you for  
> holding this meeting. There's too little of this happening. And I'd  
> like to tell Red Hat that this red saree [a reference to the colour  
> of her clothes] is more than willing to make this happen."
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All of the  
> news articles and features on Intellectual Property Watch are also  
> subject to a Creative Commons License which makes them available  
> for widescale, free, non-commercial reproduction and translation.
>
>
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