Biopiracy is the name critics give when a large company takes plants, animals, genes, or traditional know-how — things that nature, or farmers in poorer countries, developed over a long time — and then tries to lock them up with a patent. A patent is a legal right that says only that company may make or sell the product. The company may then sell a medicine or a seed for a lot of money, while the farmers or Indigenous people who first used the plant get little or nothing. The word is not a calm laboratory word. It is an accusing word, like calling someone a pirate. Environmental groups and people who speak for farmers use it. Companies doing the same collecting often call it research or bioprospecting instead. Though actually, the law around this is messy: some of the taking is allowed on paper, and still feels unfair; that is why the argument stays alive. The word was built from bio- plus piracy, and was coined in the early 1990s by a Canadian environmentalist, Pat Roy Mooney.

生物剽竊