[Ip-health] NYT op-ed on Patents for Yoga and Patents for Drugs in India

[Mike Palmedo]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/opinion/07mehta.html?_r=3D1&oref=3Dslogin=
&pagewanted=3Dprint

A Big Stretch

May 7, 2007
By SUKETU MEHTA
Op-Ed Contributor
New York Times

I GREW up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was
doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well
into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent
holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The
United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related
copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks.
There=92s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions =97 $3 billion =
a
year in America alone.

It=92s a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money
from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or
sold like sausages. Should an Indian, in retaliation, patent the
Heimlich maneuver, so that he can collect every time a waiter saves a
customer from choking on a fishbone?

The Indian government is not laughing. It has set up a task force that
is cataloging traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and
hundreds of yoga poses, to protect them from being pirated and
copyrighted by foreign hucksters. The data will be translated from
ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts, stored digitally and available in five
international languages, so that patent offices in other countries can
see that yoga didn=92t originate in a San Francisco commune.

It is worth noting that the people in the forefront of the patenting of
traditional Indian wisdom are Indians, mostly overseas. We know a
business opportunity when we see one and have exported generations of
gurus skilled in peddling enlightenment for a buck. The two scientists
in Mississippi who patented the medicinal use of turmeric, a traditional
Indian spice, are Indians. So is the strapping Bikram Choudhury, founder
of Bikram Yoga, who has copyrighted his method of teaching yoga =97 a
sequence of 26 poses in an overheated room =97 and whose lawyers sent out
threatening notices to small yoga studios that he claimed violated his
copyright.

But as an Indian, he ought to know that the very idea of patenting
knowledge is a gross violation of the tradition of yoga. In Sanskrit,
=93yoga=94 means =93union.=94 Indians believe in a universal mind =97 brahm=
an =97 of
which we are all a part, and which ponders eternally. Everyone has
access to this knowledge. There is a line in the Hindu scriptures: =93Let
good knowledge come to us from all sides.=94 There is no follow-up that
adds, =93And let us pay royalties for it.=94

Knowledge in ancient India was protected by caste lines, not legal or
economic ones. The term =93intellectual property=94 was an oxymoron: the
intellect could not be anybody=92s property. You did not pay your guru in
coin; you herded his cows and married his daughter, and passed on the
knowledge to others when you were sufficiently steeped in it. This
tradition continues today, most notably in Indian classical music, none
of whose melodies have been copyrighted.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Indians do not feel obligated to pay
for knowledge. Pirated copies of my book are openly sold on the Bombay
streets, for a fourth of its official price. Many of the plots and the
music in Bollywood movies are lifted wholesale from Hollywood. I have
sat in on Bollywood script meetings where we viewed American films and
decided that replication was the sincerest form of flattery.

Still, Indians get upset every time they hear reports =97 often overblown
=97 of Westerners=92 stealing their age-old wisdom, through the mechanism o=
f
copyright law. They were outraged by a story last year of some Americans
trying to copyright the sacred Hindu syllable =93om=94 =97 which would be l=
ike
trade-marking =93amen.=94

The fears may be exaggerated, but they are widespread and reflect
India=92s mixed experience with globalization. Western pharmaceutical
companies make billions on drugs that are often first discovered in
developing countries =97 but herbal remedies like bitter gourd or
turmeric, which are known to be effective against everything from
diabetes to piles, earn nothing for the country whose sages first
isolated their virtues. The Indian government estimates that worldwide,
2000 patents are issued a year based on traditional Indian medicines.

Drugs and hatha yoga have the same aim: to help us lead healthier lives.
India has given the world yoga for free. No wonder so many in the
country feel that the world should return the favor by making lifesaving
drugs available at reduced prices, or at least letting Indian companies
make cheap generics. If padmasana =97 a k a the lotus position =97 belongs
to all mankind, so should the formula for Gleevec, the leukemia drug
over whose patent a Swiss pharmaceuticals company is suing the Indian
government. But the drug companies are playing rough. Abbott, based in
Chicago, has decided to sell no new medicines in Thailand, in
retaliation for that country=92s producing generic versions of three
lifesaving drugs.

For decades, Indian law allowed its pharmaceutical companies to
replicate Western-patented drugs and sell them at a lower price to
countries too poor to afford them otherwise. In this way, India supplied
half of the drugs used by H.I.V.-positive people in the developing
world. But in March 2005, the Indian Parliament, under pressure to bring
the country into compliance with the World Trade Organization=92s
regulations on intellectual property, passed a bill declaring it illegal
to make generic copies of patented drugs.

This has put life-saving antiretroviral medications out of reach of many
of the nearly 6 million Indians who have AIDS. And yet, the very
international drug companies that so fiercely protect their patents
oppose India=92s attempts to amend World Trade Organization rules to
protect its traditional remedies.

There=92s more at stake than just the money involved in the commercial
exploitation of traditional knowledge. There is also the perception that
the world trading system is unfair, that the deck is stacked against
developing countries. Unless the World Trade Organization and developed
countries correct this, the entire project of globalization is at risk.

If the copying of Western drugs is illegal, so should be the patenting
of yoga. It is also intellectual piracy, stood on its head.

Suketu Mehta is the author of =93Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.=94

--
Mike Palmedo
Research Coordinator
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
American University, Washington College of Law
4910 Massachutsetts Ave., NW Washington, DC 20016
T - 202-274-4442 | F 202-274-0659
mpalmedo@wcl.american.edu