Patent Absurdity is a film I just finished watching about software patents. The film is overflowing with topics that I have long planned on exploring on this very weblog, including:

• the concept of patenting mathematics and algorithms
• the impacts of software patents on individual software developers
• the vampire like nature of companies who buy software patents, don’t build software, and sue software developers

After watching Patent Absurdity, I now plan on adding this item to that list:

• the problems with the open source movement’s leadership being dominated by elitist white men and an examination of the voices excluded

Patent Absurdity was funded and created by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), an organization whose work I have consistently admired. A representative from almost every organization linked to under the heading 'Free software advocates' in the sidebar of this very weblog was featured.

Why, given the diversity of the open source movement, did the this coalition produce a film made up of white men lecturing the viewer? The list of narrators consists of over a dozen white males, only one woman (Karen Sandler, of the Software Freedom Law Center, who rocked it by the way), and not a single person of color. In addition to the exclusion of women and people of color, there was not a single software developer affected by a software patent showcased, despite us being the individuals most affect by software patents.

I would much prefer this to be a post about how open source software was used for all the post-production work of the film, highlighting the maturity of open source software, yadda, yadda, yadda, instead of a post about the lack of diversity of the open source software movement. But, well, the lack of diversity is perhaps the biggest patent absurdity I learned about from the movie.

From the BoingBoing article:

In Brazil's version of the law, you can break DRM without breaking the law, provided you're not also committing a copyright violation.

How is it even arguably defensible to make the act of breaking DRM illegal, when (a) the DRM isn't restricting copyrighted material and (b) the person breaking the DRM legally owns the device and data unjustifiably restricted by the DRM?

The US version of Brazil's new law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, makes it illegal to break DRM, even if there is no justifiable reason for the DRM to exist. Land of the free?

For those interested in their digital freedom, here is an excellent primer on DRM.

India, home to some of humanity's oldest medicinal knowledge, recently got an unwanted education in modern western patent laws. In 1995, the US Patent Office awarded a patent to the University of Mississippi for the use of Turmeric to treat wounds.

Turmeric has been used by Indian healers, in the exact method patented, for centuries. After the patent, treating a wound with Turmeric briefly became a violation of US patent law. The modern intellectual property framework took a centuries-old medicinal tradition and made it property, but not India's property.

Luckily, India learns fast. Under the government's direction, large numbers of Indian scholars worked to create a database of indigenous knowledge to help challenge patents of this sort. The database, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, includes information on many aspects of Indian culture that go far beyond medicine. The database contains information on all manner of Indian knowledge potentially at risk of privatization. And the threat is real: even yoga positions -- ancient methods of stretching and breathing -- have been copyrighted by private entities in the US.

Rather than embracing the US model and claim Indian copyrights and patents on Indian knowledge, the government is sharing this knowledge with the world. I think Prithviraj Chavan, the minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office, summed it up rather nicely:

We have translated this into five languages and put it in the public domain. We are more than willing to share this knowledge with scholars but pharmaceutical companies won’t be able to claim patents on this.

The medicinal knowledge is safely returned to the public domain -- where it has existed for centuries -- and this new database will (hopefully) keep it there. Intellectual property law in the US has reached a point of insanity and kudos to the Indian government for not allowing their culture's knowledge to be privatized.