Both the Guardian and Australia’s ABC news have picked up on last week’s Nature story by K. S. Jayaraman about India’s moves to protect traditional knowledge by allowing European patent officers to check new patents against a database of historical remedies.

The database details ancient treatments from systems such as Ayurveda and Yoga and it is hoped it will ensure companies cannot patent things which have been used in India for generations. “We are trying to establish the claim on traditional cures,” Vinod Kumar Gupta, of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, told Jayaraman.

For ABC, Patricia Loughlan from the University of Sydney says:

…it will work. It is perfect. It is not in any way defying the patent system. That is what in a way is so clever about it. It is not you know, kicking against the traces trying to, you know, gather worldwide opinion to stop bio-piracy.

It is using what is in the patent system itself and that is what it is so clever and why it will work and why generally, politically and morally right and economically right by itself.

The Guardian focuses on the possibility that yoga “could become ‘public property’ to prevent it becoming a brand”, and quotes Gupta saying:

We want no one to appropriate the yoga brand for themselves. There are 1,500 asanas [yogic poses] and exercises given in our ancient texts. We are transcribing these so they too cannot be appropriated by anyone.

We have had instances where people have patented a yoga technique by describing a certain temperature. This is simply wrong.