India blocks Colgate patents for spices

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/490282/india-blocks-colgate-patents-spices.html

by Garbage • 11 years ago

126 48 11 years ago

deccanherald.com

jackgavigan• 11 years ago

Some background on the TKDL: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-battle-for-...

Kudos to the Indian government for coming up with an effective way to combat these bogus patents.

boot13• 11 years ago

Javascript required.

jhdevos• 11 years ago

In firefox: Preferences -> Advanced -> enable "Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page".

Other browsers will probably have similar options.

brobinson• 11 years ago

Neat. When was this added?

madez• 11 years ago

How to activate this on Firefox on Android? Do you know the name of the corresponding entry in about:config?

audunw• 11 years ago

Imagine all the countless hour of pointless human labor that could be saved if we simply abolished patents. How many man hours has been wasted in these thousands of cases? And for what? How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation?

But then again I suppose this "solves" the problem that there's not enough productive work to go around.

In a 100 years perhaps all human endeavor will be about fighting over imaginary monopolies.

ateevchopra• 11 years ago

`How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation`

Sometimes its not about innovation. Many companies buy patents and make high priced drugs. These drugs can be made available to the poor for very less price, but patents like these block local makers from doing so.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/all-tha...

primroot2• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening

primroot2• 11 years ago

"Hitherto [1848] it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. ... Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot." Wrote J.S. Mill. I do not see us getting anywhere near this state of society, certainly not as long we "need" jobs.

x5n1• 11 years ago

Patents and copyright are essentially regulatory capture, they didn't start out that way... but every time they start asking for more and more rights for longer periods of time or argue for rights of corporations rather than individuals who produced the works, they are in the territory of regulatory capture and rent seeking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

and rent seeking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

golergka2• 11 years ago

abolished patents
How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation?

I'm sorry, but you seem to have jumped from "patents" to "patenting combinations of spices" here. I don't think that you did this intentionally, but you replaced the topic in between; first, you formulate your thesis as "we should abolishing patents", and later, you seem to be proving it, but you really only prove a different thesis, "we should abolish patenting combination of spices".

Don't you see the difference between these two?

astazangasta2• 11 years ago

Err, this is called exemplification. It is a common rhetorical device. Really this could have done with any patent, which all need to go.

deskamess• 11 years ago

For the longest time I have been wondering when a pharma would try to patent Neem for tooth/other medicinal uses. Little did I know that the patent application had already happened.

I am glad such a repository exists to handle prior art for Indian medicines. I am worried about African/other poor countries that are unable to protect their indigenous medicinal use cases since they may lack the repository. Perhaps they can piggy back on the Indian effort or may be a worthy premise for a socially oriented startup with some funding from the big and/or little names in VC.

icebraining• 11 years ago

In a 100 years perhaps all human endeavor will be about fighting over imaginary monopolies.

On that note: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2834 (it's a textual story, not a comic)

angersock• 11 years ago

It's comics like this that remind me just how much better SMBC is than, say, XKCD. It's got teeth. Munroe's stuff is basically the stick figure equivalent of TED talks--people who aren't that clever or smart read them to tell other not that clever and smart people how clever and smart they are because they read XKCD.

monochromatic2• 11 years ago

Imagine all the countless hour of pointless human labor that could be saved if we simply abolished patents.

For example, all the time that pharmaceutical companies "waste" developing new drugs would be saved!

sitkack4• 11 years ago

Maybe drugs shouldn't be "invented" by pharmaceutical companies? Is a company always the best organizational structure?

6502nerdface• 11 years ago

These spice mixtures sound an awful lot like recipes, rather than inventions, and recipes should already be unpatentable (in the US, anyway). I suppose there must be some technical, legal distinction between a recipe and an invention, which Colgate has latched onto here.

benkuykendall• 11 years ago

The textbook pro-patent argument is that giving out a short-term monopoly increases the benefits of R&D. A company would have less to gain from developing a new product if anyone could then produce it.

If you want to abolish patents, you need to create a new system by which companies can benefit from their innovation.

math3• 11 years ago

Most of the time, I don't think you do. I think innovation is still going to happen anyway. For example, I think companies would have still made mobile phones and furthermore I think they would be better without patents because one maker wouldn't be arbitrarily restricted from using some idea-that-was-going-to-happen-anyway-because-the-time-was-right because another patented it. What is lost in monopolies is more than made up for in reduced overhead and ability to move quicker and come up with superior solutions because you are allowed to build on more ideas than you otherwise would. In some instances perhaps patents do act to expedite innovation (instances where time/cost to market is very high), but I think these are in the minority and that there is probably a better legal / tax / grant / political solution to that than granting of monopolies on ideas.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

The nice thing about patents is that in finite time they go public domain (unlike copyright). It is an oft overlooked value.

Abraln• 11 years ago

People need to realize that intellectual-property not a right, it is an exception to the right of freedom of speech. Too many people in power seem to have forgotten/chosen to ignore that.

themgt• 11 years ago

"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine." - Tim Minchin

This quote used to really sum up my opinion, but the more time I've spent growing and eating and researching a variety of plants/herbs/spices, it's quite clear that many of them do have quite a lot of beneficial health effects, often unique in being more effective or having less side-effects than western medicine. Plants have chemical-producing machinery that is in many ways far more advanced than what humans have developed.

And many of them have been under-researched, I think both because of 20th century biases and the regulatory/patent environment, so in fact there's quite a gap between what we call medicine and treatments in alternative medicine which could be reasonably considered likely beneficial/effective.

Just as an example, go read the Wikipedia pages and some assorted Googled info on what was listed in the article: nutmeg, ginger, “Bakul” tree, camphor, cinnamon, turmeric, Indian banyan, black pepper, long pepper, Neem and clove.

pinaceae• 11 years ago

absolutely.

so please, once you have a serious condition only take your spices.

no penicilin (or does it count as mold?), no insulin, no aneasthesia for you. just a little cinnamon.

wear glasses or contacts? away with them! a little pepper in your eyes works wonders.

and they wonder why seattle has lower polio vaccines rates than kazakhstan or tchad.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

English is not my first language, but I kinda read the OP's post as "Guys, we should throw some money in investigating some natural remedies, using the scientific method and stripping them of bullshit, to see what works, why and how"

splawn• 11 years ago

"artifical" medicine is all about having a specific dosage of the active chemical.. if you are consuming raw herbs then chances are you have no idea what dosage of the active chemical you are taking, which can affect the quality of your treatment. Given the importance of dosage (it can be the difference between medicine and poison) Tim Minchin was 100% correct.

kbenson• 11 years ago

Nothing about your included quote and the rest of your comment are mutually exclusive. The issue here is "proved". There are many, many natural remedies that have been noted to have beneficial effects. That said, the research on them may not be adequate to be viewed by the medical establishment as a known quantity. When you go to the doctor for an ailment, do you want a solution that's been shown through testing to work on 80% of people, or one that you've heard about with unknown effectiveness, and unknown side-effects?

Randomized medical trials are expensive, and pharmaceutical companies aren't exactly incentivized to do them for natural medicines, since they can't patent the result. Absurdly, additional patent capabilities here might actually help reduce that problem.

rsync• 11 years ago

"Just as an example, go read the Wikipedia pages and some assorted Googled info on what was listed in the article: nutmeg, ginger, “Bakul” tree, camphor, cinnamon, turmeric, Indian banyan, black pepper, long pepper, Neem and clove."

Actually, there's a shortcut - just read about aspirin.

It's very effective, it has truly medicinal uses, and is (for most folks) "western" medicine.

And it's just tree bark.

rurounijones• 11 years ago

OT but this is not the first comment to I don't think I am hijacking.

Page loads fine (Actually started reading the article) then goes to http://www.deccanherald.com/enable_javascript.html

How retro (Plus the fact that the page actually DOES work without JS...)

astazangasta2• 11 years ago

"Dalchini", BTW, is literally "lentil sugar". Put some in your lentils for added yum.

selimthegrim2• 11 years ago

This is probably a misspelling for darchini, i.e. cinnamon

shrikant• 11 years ago

It's not a misspelling: the Hindi word is dalchini, and the Bengali word is darchini.

pritambaral• 11 years ago

I've always heard it pronounced as "dalchini", in Hindi and three different regional languages (Bengali, Odia, and Marathi).

ruchi• 11 years ago

Native speaker here. Dalchini is the correct Hindi word for cinnamon. Think of it as the English word underdog.

sandGorgon• 11 years ago

the "prior art" for this is ancient Indian textbooks of medicine - http://www.tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/common/SourceInfo.as...

The TKDL (Traditional Knowledge Digital Library) interface really sucks.. but still has useful info.

Ayurveda - http://tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/Ayurveda/Ayu_Advancesear...

Unani (Islamic Indian medicine) -http://tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/Unani/Una_Advancesearch....

Siddha (South Indian medicine) - http://tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/siddha/Sid_Advancesearch...

Try searching for something like "basil". you get comprehensive formulae for ancient indian recipes, methods of application,etc.

India blocks Colgate patents for spices

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