Mentre sta montando la protesta per il protocollo d’intesa che il governo italiano ha firmato con Microsoft (qui qualche altra conversazione in corso), lo scrittore Suketu Mehta pubblica sull’International Herald Tribune un articolo che sembra più una pièce grottesca che il reportage di un fatto che sta accadendo. In Can you patent wisdom? racconta infatti dei brevetti che si vorrebbero introdurre sullo yoga. Si legge nel pezzo:

I grew up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories, and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions – $3 billion a year in America alone. It’s a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages.

The Indian government is not laughing. It has set up a task force that is cataloging traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and hundreds of yoga poses, to protect them from being pirated and copyrighted by foreign hucksters. The data will be translated from ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts, stored digitally, and available in five international languages, so that patent offices in other countries can see that yoga didn’t originate in a San Francisco commune.

Del resto, non è un tentativo isolato. Alcuni precedenti per esempio hanno avuto per oggetto il riso basmati, i rimedi naturali e le informazioni genetiche.