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India blocks Colgate patents for spices

deccanherald.com

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#21
post #5

Imagine all the countless hour of pointless human labor that could be saved if we simply abolished patents. How many man hours has been wasted in these thousands of cases? And for what? How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation? But then again I suppose this "solves" the problem that there's not enough productive work to go around. In a 100 years perhaps all human endeavor will be about figh…

> Imagine all the countless hour of pointless human labor that could be saved if we simply abolished patents.

For example, all the time that pharmaceutical companies "waste" developing new drugs would be saved!

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#22
post #5

Imagine all the countless hour of pointless human labor that could be saved if we simply abolished patents. How many man hours has been wasted in these thousands of cases? And for what? How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation? But then again I suppose this "solves" the problem that there's not enough productive work to go around. In a 100 years perhaps all human endeavor will be about figh…

These spice mixtures sound an awful lot like recipes, rather than inventions, and recipes should already be unpatentable (in the US, anyway). I suppose there must be some technical, legal distinction between a recipe and an invention, which Colgate has latched onto here.

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#23
post #6

"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine." - Tim Minchin This quote used to really sum up my opinion, but the more time I've spent growing and eating and researching a variety of plants/herbs/spices, it's quite clear that many of them do have quite a lot of beneficial health effects, often unique in being more effective or having less side-effects than western medicine. Pla…

absolutely. so please, once you have a serious condition only take your spices. no penicilin (or does it count as mold?), no insulin, no aneasthesia for you. just a little cinnamon. wear glasses or contacts? away with them! a little pepper in your eyes works wonders. and they wonder why seattle has lower polio vaccines rates than kazakhstan or tchad.

English is not my first language, but I kinda read the OP's post as "Guys, we should throw some money in investigating some natural remedies, using the scientific method and stripping them of bullshit, to see what works, why and how"

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#24

"Dalchini", BTW, is literally "lentil sugar". Put some in your lentils for added yum.

This is probably a misspelling for darchini, i.e. cinnamon

It's not a misspelling: the Hindi word is dalchini, and the Bengali word is darchini.

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abolished patents > How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation? I'm sorry, but you seem to have jumped from "patents" to "patenting combinations of spices" here. I don't think that you did this intentionally, but you replaced the topic in between; first, you formulate your thesis as "we should abolishing patents", and later, you seem to be proving it, but you really only prove a different t…

Err, this is called exemplification. It is a common rhetorical device. Really this could have done with any patent, which all need to go.

With any? Really?

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#26
post #5

Imagine all the countless hour of pointless human labor that could be saved if we simply abolished patents. How many man hours has been wasted in these thousands of cases? And for what? How is patenting combination of spices going to increase innovation? But then again I suppose this "solves" the problem that there's not enough productive work to go around. In a 100 years perhaps all human endeavor will be about figh…

The textbook pro-patent argument is that giving out a short-term monopoly increases the benefits of R&D. A company would have less to gain from developing a new product if anyone could then produce it.

If you want to abolish patents, you need to create a new system by which companies can benefit from their innovation.

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#27
post #6

"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? - Medicine." - Tim Minchin This quote used to really sum up my opinion, but the more time I've spent growing and eating and researching a variety of plants/herbs/spices, it's quite clear that many of them do have quite a lot of beneficial health effects, often unique in being more effective or having less side-effects than western medicine. Pla…

Nothing about your included quote and the rest of your comment are mutually exclusive. The issue here is "proved". There are many, many natural remedies that have been noted to have beneficial effects. That said, the research on them may not be adequate to be viewed by the medical establishment as a known quantity. When you go to the doctor for an ailment, do you want a solution that's been shown through testing to work on 80% of people, or one that you've heard about with unknown effectiveness, and unknown side-effects?

Randomized medical trials are expensive, and pharmaceutical companies aren't exactly incentivized to do them for natural medicines, since they can't patent the result. Absurdly, additional patent capabilities here might actually help reduce that problem.

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#29

"Dalchini", BTW, is literally "lentil sugar". Put some in your lentils for added yum.

This is probably a misspelling for darchini, i.e. cinnamon

I've always heard it pronounced as "dalchini", in Hindi and three different regional languages (Bengali, Odia, and Marathi).

Re: India blocks Colgate patents for spices

#30
post #4
post #3

Javascript required.

In firefox: Preferences -> Advanced -> enable "Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page". Other browsers will probably have similar options.

How to activate this on Firefox on Android? Do you know the name of the corresponding entry in about:config?
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