Biopiracy
From http://www.scidev.net/dossiers/index.cfm?fuseaction=policybrief&policy=40§ion=171&dossier=8:
"the word 'biopiracy' was coined by the North American advocacy group, Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group) — formerly known as Rural Advancement Foundation International — to refer to the uncompensated commercial use of biological resources or associated Traditional Knowledge from developing countries, as well as the patenting by corporations of claimed inventions based on such resources or knowledge.
ETC Group and others allege that such patents are wrongly awarded. This could be due to a number of factors: the examiners may not have enough time and resources to conduct 'prior art' searches; the required standards of inventiveness being applied to patent applications may be too low; or the companies or scientific institutions applying for the patents may deliberately fail to cite the prior art upon which their inventions were based.
Groups such as ETC claim to have uncovered many cases either of patents being acquired for 'inventions' that are closely based on TK (such as the pesticidal uses of seeds from the neem tree), or of Plant Breeders' Rights (PBR) certificates — a kind of IPR system for plant varieties — being awarded for plant varieties that are virtually identical to 'folk varieties' of the same plants. ETC Group claims to have identified over 100 cases of PBR protection being sought for varieties acquired from international genebanks, many of which they allege are folk varieties that have been subjected to little, if any, additional breeding.
The bioprospecting/'biopiracy' debate has pitted corporations against a number of developing country governments and indigenous peoples, who claim that they are being exploited by such practices. It has also led to tensions between academic researchers, who have long studied biological resources for primarily scientific reasons — and maintain that ethically sound and non-exploitative bioprospecting is possible — and environmental NGOs. [2] Indeed, some of the latter take an extreme view, dismissing all bioprospecting as biopiracy by another name." (http://www.scidev.net/dossiers/index.cfm?fuseaction=policybrief&policy=40§ion=171&dossier=8)