[M]ost of us in developing countries find it difficult to accept the notion that biodiversity should flow freely to industrial countries while the flow of biological products from the industrial countries
is patented, expensive and considered the private property of the firms that produce them. This asymmetry
reflects the inequality of opportunity and is unjust. [FN55]
Others argue that the neem patent exemplifies how unfair international intellectual property regimes are
to communal or traditional forms of knowledge. They contend that because intellectual property regimes
have no mechanism for providing intellectual property protection to cultural or communal knowledge, that
knowledge is susceptible to theft. As Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a scholar of international law, explains,
the fundamental presumptions of most intellectual property regimes exclude indigenous and local knowledge
and thus allow injustices to take place: