Steal this plant: Brazil fights big pharma name-nappers
Xeni Jardin:
BoingBoing reader Chris Spurgeon says,

Brazil is sick and tired of companies stealing their plant names, and they’re not going to take it any more! Brazil has a wonderful rep for not just rolling over and accepting the increasingly draconian intellectual property treaties being foisted on developing nations by the first world. Their latest move comes in response to a growing trend. It goes like this:

1) Brazilians spend millennia eating some great tasting Brazilian plant that’s also great for your health.

2) Foreign company learns about the plant.

3) Foreign company trademarks the plant name and creates a company to sell the plant (turned into a health drink, or shampoo, or anti-aging cream, or brain-topic pills, or God knows what else).

4) Some poor guy in Brazil opens up a local business cooking up the plant for the locals. (He uses the plant name in his company’s name). He starts a little export business selling his product.

5) He gets the pants sued off of him because some company 5,000 miles away trademarked the plant name. Never mind the fact that folks in Brazil have been calling the plant by that name forever.

6) Repeat over and over.

Brazil has now come up with a wonderfully pragmatic way to break this cycle. They’ve compiled a list (there’s a pdf here) of more than 5,000 Portuguese language names of plants, seeds, roots, etc. They’ve shipped the list off to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and trademark offices around the world. The idea is that if all of these organizations and countries know a term is already in use they will be less likely to grant some company a trademark on it. Clever!

Link to article on the Intellectual Property Watch website. Image courtesy of Mauro Peixoto at The Fantastic World of Brazilian Plants, which does indeed look quite fantastic.

Reader comment: Jason Bandlow says,

Brazil is not the only country trying to defend the knowledge its people have had for centuries. This article from the BBC last December describes India doing the same thing for medicine. Link

Originally posted by noemail@noemail.org (Xeni Jardin) from Boing Boing, ReBlogged by perry on Aug 5, 2006 at 02:18 PM

(Via Eyebeam reBlog.)