It was nearly ten years before the Amazon tribe learned that the dead vine had become a patent in the United States. They are very angry about it. They can't understand how a foreigner can apply for a patent for a sacred plant that they have worshipped and used for thousands of years. A Council composed of more than 400 Amazon tribes and organizations and the Canadian Center for International Environmental Law filed a complaint with the US Patent and Trademark Office with 1999, demanding that the agency re-examine and revoke the patent. They also sent a tribal chief to the United States to testify that Amazonian aborigines have used dead vines for thousands of years. However, this testimony is considered "without legal effect" because the patent law does not recognize inventions that have not been published in written form in public publications and can be found by anyone. In other words, oral knowledge is not protected by American patents and intellectual property rights.
Later, the United States Patent and Trademark Office ordered the rejection of the patent, not because it involved the prior knowledge of local tribes, but because a year before the application was filed, a specimen description board of the Field Museum in Chicago had described the same plant, so it did not have the "novelty" required by the patent. In other words, the fact that Amazonians had knowledge about dead vines in the form of oral communication before and used this plant still did not prevent them from applying for patents.
The patent case of Dead Vine exposed the embarrassment of current intellectual property rights and patent system in protecting genetic resources and traditional knowledge. Dead vines are the genetic resources of Amazon. The utility of ayahuasca belongs to their traditional knowledge, which is the secret of Amazon tribe since ancient times. However, unless these tribes disclose their secrets, their traditional knowledge will not be recognized by the patent system and will not be protected by intellectual property rights. Making such secrets public violates the cultural traditions of these tribes for thousands of years. What is even more embarrassing is that if someone obtains their resources and traditional knowledge, even if it is only a scratch, as long as he publishes and applies for a patent, he will be recognized and protected.
This practice of stealing traditional knowledge shared by other ethnic groups through patents has been condemned by many biodiversity experts and NGOs, who call it "biological piracy". Because of the obvious bias of intellectual property rights and patent system exposed in the case of Dead Vine, they also questioned and challenged the existing intellectual property rights and patent system.
Some experts believe that the death patent case is also an embarrassment in the era of privatization. Qi Yongling, legal adviser of the Malaysian Third World Network Organization, said that traditional knowledge is not private, but the trend in the contemporary world seems to be to protect private property. Then, the ownership and protection of public property, such as traditional knowledge like the dead vine, originally does not belong to any private ownership, so there is a big problem. According to the current intellectual property law, to protect this traditional knowledge, we must first publish the secret to the public database, and then protect it through patents. However, this traditional knowledge belongs to the community and not to any individual. How many generations of ancestors have passed it down and who will publish it? How to announce it? Once the patent is published and formed, how to share the benefits? Qi Yongling believes that this is almost an unsolved problem. However, if this kind of traditional knowledge is published and patented by an individual without authorization, as in the case of the patent case of Dead Vine, then the original public traditional knowledge becomes a private right, and people will pay the price for the traditional knowledge that they were entitled to enjoy for free. This is very unreasonable.
The Convention on Biological Diversity has noticed this problem, and proposed that patents based on traditional knowledge should indicate their sources and give traditional knowledge due recognition and respect. But this still can't solve the problem: patents will bring profits to patent applicants. On the basis of traditional knowledge, we obtained patents and made profits. Is it enough to just admit that its source is traditional knowledge? Do owners of traditional knowledge have the right to share profits?
The Convention on Biological Diversity tries to introduce a benefit-sharing mechanism in the process of obtaining genetic resources to replace intellectual property rights, but the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the World Trade Organization still dominates. Critics say that the agreement is the first time that international regulations have extended patents to the biological field. However, when making this agreement, most countries in the world did not realize that it was for the convenience of private monopoly of genes, including human genes and organic microorganisms, and for the commercialization of genetically modified seeds, fish, animals, vaccines and other drugs. Therefore, they put forward that the current judicial system of intellectual property rights must be changed to solve the problem of turning natural resources and community knowledge into private ownership through intellectual property rights. They believe that the core issue of obtaining resources and sharing benefits is to recognize the rights of local people and communities to their land, resources and knowledge, which is the sovereignty of the state to protect national heritage, the principle of prior informed consent and the restriction of intellectual property claims related to resources and knowledge. They quoted 1999 United Nations Human Development Report as saying that "the relentless March of intellectual property rights needs to be stopped and questioned" and they called for "the whole society urgently needs to re-examine intellectual property laws".