Note on Code Swaraj
and it flies in the face of my experiences over three decades of putting public information online.
I sent notes to many people asking them what they thought of this. They agreed all with me that keeping the database secret was not helping prevent bad patents. I have come to the conclusion that keeping this information secret is hurting the propagation and diffusion of important public domain knowledge. I should note that I have never seen the database, and Sanskrit scholars caution that simply throwing formulations willy-nilly into a database without fully understanding the underlying texts will simply fulfill the old-age principle of garbage in, garbage out.
Nonetheless, the database exists, it is reputed to be of very high quality, and I believe making it more broadly available can contribute to the diffusion of useful knowledge. If the information is useful for beating back bad patents, making that information available to a broader group of patent-busters can only help that situation. If the data is not of the highest quality, allowing Sanskrit scholars to annotate it would be useful. And, of course, propagation of the Ayurvedic and Unani sciences would be immensely useful.
A more effective strategy than making a database just for examiners seems to be encouraging patent busters like Vandana Shiva. My colleague Beth Noveck, who headed Barack Obama’s open government efforts in the White House (and is a good friend of Sam Pitroda as well), pioneered a system called “Peer To Patent,” in which patent examiners worked with people on the net to try and find examples of prior art. Rather than simply make the database available to a few patent examiners, Peer To Patent leveraged the wisdom of crowds to achieve much better results.
I’m not sure I know the answers here, but my inclination is that the government’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library database should be available to the public. It consists of public domain knowledge, it was gathered at great expense by the government, and making it available would be good for traditional knowledge.
As a government enterprise, it would also seem that the Copyright Act, the Right to Information Act, and the Constitution all lean strongly towards disclosure. Perhaps I am in wrong in this inclination, but my hope is to begin this conversation in India in 2018, perhaps resulting in a formal petition to the government to make their database available to the public, not just on a portal, but for bulk download and reuse.
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