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Wednesday, December 14 2005

India Cataloging Traditional Medicines to Fight Bad Western Patents

The U.S. patent system (as well as others, I suppose) is broken; the USPTO is overwhelmed, and granting patents for "inventions" that are obvious or already in use. To stop the patenting of plants and traditional medicines that have been in use for thousands of years, doctors in India are creating a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library:

"'When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions. Till now, we have not done the needful to protect our traditional wealth,' says Ajay Dua, a senior bureaucrat in the federal commerce ministry....
"In 1995, the US Patent Office granted a patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric.
"Indian scientists protested and fought a two-year-long legal battle to get the patent revoked.
"Last year, India won a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent Office against a patent granted on an anti-fungal product, derived from neem, by successfully arguing that the medicinal neem tree is part of traditional Indian knowledge.
"In 1998 the US Patent Office granted patent to a local company for new strains of rice similar to basmati, which has been grown for centuries in the Himalayan foothills of north-west India and Pakistan and has become popular internationally. After a prolonged legal battle, the patent was revoked four years ago."

Saturday, December 3 2005

And in election technology news...

(Mostly via Dave Farber's Interesting People list)
In November:

"The law requires escrow of the source code for all voting systems to be certified in the state and identification of programmers. In today's hearing, the judge told Diebold if it wanted to continue in the bidding process for certified election systems in the state, it must follow the law and if it failed to do so, it would face liability."

"In all, three companies were certified for e-voting in North Carolina: Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software. However, Keith Long, an advisor to the Board of Elections who was formerly employed by both Diebold and Sequoia, has said that 'none of them' could meet the statutory requirement to place their system code in escrow. Instead of rejecting all applications and issuing a new call for bids as required by law, the Board chose to approve all of the applicants."

Thursday, December 1 2005

Stanley Tookie Williams

Color of Change is collecting signatures to support granting clemency to Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of the Crips.
Whether jail, and the justice system, should generally be a tool for rehabilitation or retribution, in this case, it looks like rehabilitiation has worked in this case. Retribution for Williams' many past crimes would be counter-productive at this point; leaving him alive in jail, where he can continue to be a positive force, makes more sense. Consider signing the petition.

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...