Last week, at a conference in Geneva, the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organisation agreed on a new treaty aimed at preventing the for-profit piracy of traditional knowledge. So-called "biopiracy", in which companies lift ideas from traditional knowledge and patent them, is a significant problem. In one case a US company patented derivatives of the neem tree as pesticides, when the plant's properties were already well known to local communities in India. There have also been