"For thousands of years, Indian villagers have used an extract from seeds of the neem tree as an insecticide. So when a US company patented a process for producing a process for producing the substance in 1994, India reacted with outrage.

"After spending millions of dollars in legal fees to overturn the patent, India’s government is now creating a 30-million-page database of traditional knowledge to fend off entrepreneurs trying to patent the country’s ancient lore. India is not alone in worrying about ‘the bio-prospectors’ profiting from the genetic resources of its plant life with no benefit to its people. It joined China, Brazil, and nine other countries a few years ago to begin pushing for international protections. The database project has already caught the interest of others. A South African team recently visited and a Mongolian mission is coming in January, said V.K. Gupta, chairman of India’s National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources.

"The database, called The Traditional Knowledge Data Library (TKDL) will make information available to patent offices around the world to ensure that traditional remedies are not presented as new discoveries.

"‘If societies have been using it for centuries why should it be patented?’ asked Shiv Basant, of the Health Ministry’s Department of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Saddha and Homeopathy, India’s traditional health and medical disciplines.

"The government has also successfully challenged patents on the use of the spice turmeric to heal wounds and rashes and a patent on a rice strain derived from India’s famous Basmati rice.

"But that is a tiny fraction of the problem. A 2003 study of Mr. Gupta’s institute estimated that about 7,000 patents worldwide are based on indigenous Indian knowledge, far too many for India to challenge in expensive legal fights. Officials hope the database will head off future battles.

"Currently it is difficult for overseas patent office researchers to prove purported innovations are really based on old lore because whereas the information is widely published in Indian, it is often in ancient languages such as Sanskrit or modern regional languages like Tamil.

"Instead of laboriously translating the manuscripts, the scholars structure the texts into classifications widely used by patent examiners. The texts are then entered into the database, where specially developed software translates them into Hindi, English, German, French, Japanese and Spanish.

"More than 1,500 yoga poses have been entered. That’s because yoga poses also have been patented, often by Indians living abroad."

And of course, the current theft increases both "inflation" and the current "GDP."

– from Economic Reform, February 2006