India’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has signed a traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) access agreement with the Japan Patent Office (JPO).
The TKDL was created to protect India’s traditional medicinal and plant formulations and help prevent misappropriation of this knowledge through unethical patents or biopiracy.
TKDL has made accessible to international patent examiners 148 books on Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Yoga by transcribing them into 34 million pages of information. This information on Indian traditional knowledge in available in five languages: English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. The access agreements have been designed to ensure that the digital library is used strictly for search and examination purposes to ensure that the traditional knowledge is kept confidential during the search process. Patent examiners at various international patent offices use the library to search for patents and examine them. However they are not permitted to disclose the search results to a third party.
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Over the last two years, India has signed TKDL access agreements with the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the UK Intellectual Property Office, the German Patent Office, the Patent Office of Australia and the Canada Patent Office.
The agreements with Japanese, US and European patent offices have been particularly useful because these offices handle the majority of international patent filings.
If a patent application were to be rejected by any of these offices, it would also be rejected by the others.
If a patent application is found to contain Indian systems of medicine, which are already available in the public domain, the patent will not be granted.
Patents granted could also be revoked if they are found to contain prior art with no new or inventive elements. India has fought successfully to revoke patents granted by the USPTO for turmeric and basmati rice, as well as a neem patent granted by the EPO.
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