On Monday 30 Jul 2007 10:52 am, Charles Haynes wrote:
> Patents were introduced to increase sharing of knowledge. Till then
> professional knowledge ("intellectual property") was kept as closely
> held guild and trade secrets.
>
> Patents are intended to increase sharing of knowledge.In fact people still keep secrets, despite patents. The only thing the patent does for you is to allow you to claim that you were the first to think of that particular idea. The only way you can do that is by saying what you have done. Patents are designed to protect your copyright and to create a public notice that you are the first one to register a particular bit of knowledge so that nobody else can claim that they thought of it before you did. This is where the controversy about patenting old and well known stuff comes in. Turmeric has known medicinal properties in India systems of medicine. It was never patented. The concept of patents was invented outside India long after the medicinal properties of turmeric were recognized. A move by some entity to patent the medicinal use of turmeric is by no means a method of increasing sharing of knowledge. It is a means of restricting the use of knowledge on condition that the patent holder either gets paid or the user fulfils some other condition. So the contention that knowledge sharing is improved by patenting fails on this count. Also - there was a particular group that was seen in India as a Western entity that tried to patent the use of turmeric (or some well known Indian medicinal plant product) in some Western nation. That gels in quite well with the contention that "patents were an evil western invention intended to enrich people". Nations and scientists make advances all the time that they do not patent because they are state secrets or secrets otherwise. Many of these advances are duplicated elsewhere and there is nothing the inventor nation can do when that happens. Patenting was devised to make public some knowledge that could be shared while ensuring that the first guy who thought of that would get paid for thinking of it first. shiv
