Stoves, charcoal and intellectual property rights

["New Dawn Engineering /ATEX" <crispin@newdawn.sz>]

Dear Stovers

I am representing Swaziland at a UN conference on appropriate technology and
intellectual property law in Maseru at the end of the month.

I am interested to know if anyone have any private contributions that would
open up this interesting field of law.  At the moment the entire body of law
is pretty much drawn up to favour the formal inventor-entrepreneur.  Things
like indigenous 'intellectual property' (if indeed it can be called that)
which has been (legally speaking) 'public' for generations and their
exploitation give rise to the most uninformed, emotional arguments.

I have in mind drawing up an entirely new set of intellectual property
agreements that are not founded in law but in 'fair practise' and rooted in
the well established rules of "shareware" as software is on the Net.

Do you have any perspectives on this?

As intellectual property protection and law enforcement in its present form
is basically unavailable to the masses because of its cost, I am proposing a
set of guidelines rather like the Sullivan Principles to govern the use of
'appropriate technology' and 'indigenous knowledge' which morally obligate
someone who is profiting from knowledge they obtained for a 'secreted'
source (not necessarily a patentable source) to pay the source, be it an
individual, a legal body, or a 'tribe' or 'ethnic group'.

At the moment the gap between formal sector corporations patenting processes
that mimic natural ones and the 'defenders' of indigenous knowledge (which
is a lot of what appropriate technology is about) is unbridgeable.  The
'defenders' want full patent protection and licencing for common knowledge.
It is my opinion that in large part people think that this protection is ad
infinitum.  Because many people in Africa, for example, wring whole economic
lives out of creating a large amount of information friction around a tiny
piece of information (like how to repair an aluminum pot) there is
widespread expectation that information on healing or technology should be
paid for forever because now the information 'is out'.  These expectations
are clearly out of tune with a regular patent.

I expect the conference to be filled with uninformed recriminations and
accusations with the 'Third World' ganging up on 'multinationals' however
there might just be a place for a new initiative.

I know enough about intellectual property law to be aware of my own
ignorance of it.  Therefore I am inviting you to participate in this
initiative.  Obviously no one is getting paid for any of this.  It is just a
chance to write the first page of a new chapter in international
intellectual property law.

I am representing a country so I will sift and append to try to make a
proposal that is representative of a defensible position at this juncture.

The development, dissemination and trading in stoves is a perfect example of
problems related to this sector of international law.

Can a Swazi come to the USA and learn the tricks of the trade by cleverly
interviewing stove designers on the excuse that he is collecting information
for village tinsmiths at home. Then he goes home and works with a few
buddies and they make a minor breakthrough based on their own knowledge of
stoves.  They then patent this and go to a US manufacturer, licencing them
at bug bucks, essentially selling the accumulated knowledge they got from
the Stovers in the US plus their little extra insight.  How do the stovers
feel when they go to buy an expensive stove that is patented mainly based on
information they gave the Swazi?  Is this intellectual piracy?  Should some
of the income go to the original advisers?

Suppose I read all the comments ever passed on this discussion group and
realize that adding up all the wood burning information equals a brilliant
new patent.  I have thought of nothing at all, only read the postings.  Who
gets the income?  Who should get the income?

Should the stovers advise me on how to generate a patentable invention?  Can
I get a manufacturer interested in making a new stove if it is not
protected?

Interesting stuff, this.

Regards
Crispin


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