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Traditional Knowledge Digital Library

Posted on December 10, 2007 by Blog Editor

A Roundtable on Building Community Capacity:  a Roundtable on Practical Initiatives on Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions, Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources will take place at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, from December 10 to 12, 2007.

The Roundtable is an informal, practically-oriented event.  It responds to the strong level of interest expressed by many national authorities and community representatives in sharing experience and developing dialogue and cooperation on practical initiatives to build capacity for the appropriate protection of intellectual property and traditional cultural expressions (TCEs), traditional knowledge (TK) and genetic resources (GR).

The Roundtable follows in the tradition of community consultation that has been part of WIPO’s program in this domain since its inception with the first fact-finding consultations dating back to 1998 and 1999.

One of the first such projects, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, is being compiled by hundreds of doctors in India with the help of software engineers and patent examiners, an encyclopedia of the country's traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own novel inventions and patenting them.

The BBC reported on this a couple of years ago.

Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they describe as "bio-piracy" for a long time.

"When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions. Till now, we have not done the needful to protect our traditional wealth," says Ajay Dua, a senior bureaucrat in the federal commerce ministry.

Putting together the encyclopaedia is a daunting task.

For one, ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language. Material from these texts is being translated into five international languages, using sophisticated software coding.

The sheer wealth of material that has to be read through for information is enormous - there are some 54 authoritative 'text books' on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old.
   
People outside India are not aware of our immense traditional knowledge wealth

Then there are nearly 150,000 recorded ayurvedic, unani and siddha medicines; and some 1,500 asanas (physical exercises and postures) in yoga, which originated in India more than 5,000 years ago.

Under normal circumstances, a patent application should always be rejected if there is prior existing knowledge about the product.

But in most of the developed nations like United States, "prior existing knowledge" is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database - not if it has been passed down through generations of oral and folk traditions.

The irony here is that India has suffered even though its traditional knowledge, as in China, has been documented extensively.

But information about traditional medicine has never been culled from their texts, translated and put out in the public domain.

PBS Online NewsHour reported on the story again this year, interviewing V.K. Gupta Director, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, and posted  the audio with a transcript of the program here.

If readers have more information about this ambitious defensive publication, or any like it being undertaken in  China or other countries with indigenous medicinal knowledge, we'd be interested if you might  take a few minutes and leave comments about this at the link below.

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A Short Guide to Defensive Publication

Posted on December 6, 2007 by Blog Editor

Defensive publication is the practice of disclosing details about innovations to the public, thereby preserving the innovation as a public good by preventing others from patenting it. Since a defensive publication makes a description of the innovation available publicly, the innovation can no longer be called new (novel) and thus cannot be patented.

A briefing paper, Defensive Publishing: A Strategy for Maintaining Intellectual Property as Public Goods, presented  to the International Service for Agricultural Research several years ago, first introduces the practice of defensive publication then reviews the concept of novelty, which is at the center of its use. It then describes the various options available for defensive publishing and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each. The conclusion presents a table that research managers can use to aid decisions on defensive publishing both forms and methods.

The authors of this article, Stephen Adams and Victoria Henson-Apollonio, argue that defensive publishing is just one of a range of tools that enable scientists and research enterprises to exploit their intellectual property effectively. Indeed, they say, it should not be used alone, but rather as part of an institutional strategy for management of intellectual property assets. They call on public research organizations to put such strategies into place.

The introduction to this paper provides a short guide to defensive publication.

Scientific research generates “intellectual property” (IP), that is, new knowledge and ideas belonging to the individual creators who did the research or the enterprises that funded the work. A range of strategies are available to enable scientists and research enterprises to exploit their IP effectively. One such strategy in use by national and international research institutes and private entities is “defensive publication.” While not suitable in all circumstances or for all types of research outcomes, defensive publication can be an effective way to disseminate scientific results in order to preserve the results as a public good.

In addition, some forms of defensive publication enable the scientist/innovator to maintain some control over the use of their results or invention. In a defensive publication, the scientists disclose details about their innovation to the public, thereby preserving their freedom to use the invention by preventing others from patenting it. The link between defensive publication and patenting is the requirement for novelty in a patent application. Since a published description of the research product is available, it can no longer be called new and thus patent-worthy. This is how defensive publishing effectively prevents competitors (and possibly even the originating scientist) from patenting an identical or similar innovation.

The defensive publication route is especially useful for innovations that do not warrant the high costs incurred in patent applications but to which scientists do want to retain access. It is especially useful for agricultural researchers in the public sector, since it is not only a means by which they can communicate results to others. But, when done properly, it serves the additional purpose of forestalling eventual patent awards on the research product described, hence preserving the innovation as a public good.

Commercial companies too are fast adopting defensive publishing as a key element of their IP management strategy. According to Richard Poynder’s analysis in the Financial Times,1 as the costs of patent applications and litigation continue to rise defensive publishing is offering scientists another option: by making published descriptions of their innovative research products available to the public, they prevent others from patenting them, thus they ensure the results’ continued availability without incurring the significant legal and filing fees involved in patenting.

Literature searches are typically a main element of patent grant procedures. Lack of published documentation on an innovation—or lack of such documentation in the literature traditionally reviewed by patent examiners— may indicate to a patent examiner that the innovation is indeed new and worthy of patent protection. Even older innovations might be judged patent-worthy if a search reveals no published record of the invention. In one case, Indian activists challenged the 1995 award of patent rights over products traditionally derived by local communities from the spice turmeric, persuading the US Patent and Trademark Office to revoke the patent by pointing out literature referring to the “invention” published previous to the patent application date. Effective defensive publication thus can keep innovations out of the private domain and open for use by scientists both in the developing and the developed world, without fear of patent infringement on their part or on the part of the end-users of their products.

In conclusion, the authors write:

This Briefing Paper has provided an overview of defensive publishing for institutions weighing the options available for publishing research results and disclosing innovations...In short, if the main concern is to reach a specific audience but there is little interest in using the publication as prior art to trigger the rejection of a patent claim, then self-publication is likely the most cost-effective means of disclosure. But other options should be considered if an organization’s main goal in publishing is to defeat a potential patent application. In this case, using a commercial company that specializes in publications that reach the attention of most patent examiners is the recommended course.

This Briefing Paper looks at defensive publishing as an IP management strategy that is particularly relevant for agricultural researchers working in the public sector, but it's worth considering for its implications for innovative organizations in the private sector, as well, and across a wide range of industries including technology, pharmacology, and agronomy.

Abstract republished with permission of and credit to Eldis.

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Papers on Managing Intellectual Property

Posted on December 5, 2007 by Blog Editor

The International Journal of Intellectual Property Management  (IJIPM) is calling for papers to be published in an upcoming special issue: "Tug of War in the Field of IP – Searching for a Balanced Attitude to Managing Intellectual Property".

This special issue addresses the balance between different approaches to managing intellectual property, the tug of the war in the field of IP. Instead of just evaluating benefits and downsides of varying alternatives, the goal is to bring together studies that discuss seemingly contradictory issues in an integrative manner, paying attention to their interplay. In addition to providing tools for choosing between alternative forms of IP management as such, the aim is to find ways for managing combinations of contradicting strategies.

For this special issue, contributions are invited from scholars and practitioners with insights from economic, legal, and management perspectives on dealing with paradoxes related to IP management. Papers may be theoretical or empirical in nature.

The subject areas for the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • IP management in open innovation
  • Knowledge sharing and protection for profiting from IP
  • Organising for IP management
  • IP management in different networks
  • Managing IP when collaborating with competitors (coopetition)
  • Dilemmas related to standardisation and IP management
  • Combining different appropriability mechanisms
  • Efficient and profitable uses of intellectual property rights
  • Defensive publishing vs. patenting
  • Alignment of business strategy and IP strategy
  • Organisational capabilities in choosing IP management approach
  • Managerial values and attitudes in creating innovative combinations
February 1, 2008 is the deadline for submission of articles.


Click here for more details about the IJIPM and the call for papers.

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