India: Caution On Classifying Traditional Knowledge Under IPRs

From The Hindu: Even as the government has initiated the process of vetting a draft Bill on the protection and management of traditional knowledge (TK), experts caution against creating monopoly rights on TK and classifying it under intellectual property rights.

Read the full article on The Hindu here.

Prepared by a six-member committee headed by Dr. N.S. Gopalakrishnan, Director, Inter University Centre for IPR Studies, CUSAT, the draft Bill is understood to have proposed the constitution of people’s trusts for protection of TK at the panchayat and district level, on the lines of the Biodiversity Management Committees. The Bill has been referred to the Law Department for verification.

“We should be careful in creating registrable rights on TK”, says R.S. Praveen Raj, a former examiner with the India Patent Office and currently a scientist at the CSIR-National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (NIIST) here.

He feels that any attempt to codify community-held TK in the form of Traditional Knowledge Digital Libraries (TKDL) using “Prior Informed Consent” and “Access and Benefit Sharing” concepts would be a gross injustice to those communities if the knowledge was shared with patent offices. Designed to prevent misappropriation of traditional knowledge, TKDL contains approximately 2,08,000 formulations based on Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga. India has signed an access agreement with the European Patent Office and US Patents and Trademark Office on the premise that the database shall be used for search and examination only. “It leaves the scope for private appropriation of TK by making cosmetic improvements,” says Dr. Raj.

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