India’s Digital Library of Traditional Knowledge—a New Tool in Protecting Indigenous Rights

"As concerns about the misappropriation of traditional knowledge rise, India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) created a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) as a resource for documenting traditional knowledge, like the traditionally known medicinal properties of plants. Representatives from 35 countries attended the conference to discover the Library’s successes, and understand how to apply a similar system to their own country. The TKDL is an effort to provide patent offices with resources to understand India’s traditional knowledge....The intention is to allow these examiners to better understand the historical knowledge and to prevent complex and expensive opposition procedures. The Indian government estimates (in their press release) that the cost of opposing a granted patent at the international level can cost between $200,000 and $600,000. The TKDL contains around 226,000 medical formulations; opposition proceedings for all of these formulations would be prohibitively expensive. With disclosure, however, comes protection of other forms. The surprising part is that the information is only accessible to these offices via Access and Non-Disclosure Agreements. As I mentioned in my earlier post about the restrictive copyright policies of the ACM and the IEEE, locking knowledge away isn’t the best way to create a system of scientific advancement...."