mattermorphosis

"But why should the rest of the world care if the Americans are issuing silly patents? They should care because the new American system has encouraged the ‘theft’ of ideas that are well-known in other countries, especially developing countries, but are not legally protected precisely because they have been so well known for such a long time. This is is known as the theft of ‘traditional knowledge’. The best example in this regard is the patent granted in 1995 to two Indian researchers at the University of Mississippi for the medicinal use of turmeric, whose wound-healing properties have been known in India for thousands of years. The patent was only cancelled thanks to the challenge mounted in the American courts by the New Delhi-based Council for Agriculture Research. This patentmight be still there if the wronged country had been some small and very poor developing nation that lacked India’s human and financial resources to fight such battles."

Consequences of lowering the originality bar in the US patent system… Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism