Note on Code Swaraj
When I got back to California, I ordered a raft of books about traditional knowledge and biopiracy, starting of course with the groundbreaking works of Vandana Shiva. I sent notes to some Sanskrit scholars of ancient medicine who were active users of our Public Library of India and asked them what they thought. I read histories of Ayurvedic medicine and intellectual property books about patents on traditional knowledge.
Two things intrigued me. First, Darshan Shankar had sent me 13 CDs which they sell, with titles such as “Medicinal Plants in Homeopathy” and “Medicinal Plants of Kerala.” Each CD had a simple database interface and consisted of pictures of plants with text, keywords, and other materials. These discs seemed like they could easily translate into a nice Internet interface.
The other thing that was puzzling me was a massive government effort known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. The system had been built over the years by painstakingly transcribing over 150 books, and then codifying 297,183 traditional Ayurvedic and Unani formulations into a database. Eminent experts had selected the texts, and as best as I could tell this database represented the state of the art of codified traditional knowledge Ayurvedic formulations. There was a catch though: the database was not available to the public, only to patent examiners.
I have long grumbled about the U.S. Patent system. I’ve felt that the vast majority of “business method” and “software” patents do far more harm than good and are very rarely innovative or unique. I put the U.S. patent database on the Internet in 1994, and I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the procedures for issuing patents and have spoken to a large number of people who use patents in their daily work. In fact, when I first placed the patent database on the Internet, some of my most ardent users were employees of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, who had awful, antiquated search facilities at work and came home to use my system to do their research.
In addition to the overgrown thickets of business methods and software patents, there have been similar issues in medicine. In particular, the U.S. and European patent offices had issued a number of highly questionable patents that had inflamed passions in India, Africa, and many other locations with a deep history of using traditional knowledge in their day-to-day lives.
The most famous one was the patent on turmeric. Turmeric has long been known to have a number of healing properties, including healing of wounds. Two American researchers obtained a patent on the “use of turmeric powder
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