Biopiracy and India's defence

Biopiracy is the commercial exploitation of naturally occurring biological materials or genetic resources, often using the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples (about farming, medicinal plants, food crops) without recognising them or sharing the benefits. India has fought three famous cases:

• Neem: in the 1990s, the company W.R. Grace and the US Department of Agriculture obtained a patent on a method of extracting neem oil for use as a pesticide, even though Indians had used neem this way for centuries. The European Patent Office revoked it in 2000.
• Turmeric: in 1995, two researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center got a US patent for using turmeric to heal wounds. India's CSIR produced ancient texts proving the knowledge was old, and the US Patent Office revoked it in 1997.
• Basmati: in 1997, the US company RiceTec Inc. got a US patent on basmati rice strains and ways of breeding them. After a campaign, several of its claims were struck down. The case showed the value of Geographical Indications, which link a product's name to its place of origin.

India's defence. Old knowledge is not a new invention, but patent offices abroad could not easily read texts in Sanskrit, Hindi or Tamil to know what was already known. So India set up the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), an idea that grew out of the turmeric case. It translates traditional medicinal knowledge into languages and formats that patent examiners worldwide can search, so that they can refuse patents on it.