Goals and Expectations of Industry for Intellectual Property Rights for Plant Materials

This chapter deals with research-based seed companies and companies that produce novel genotypes (usually through biotechnology) for use in plant breeding. Intellectual property rights are used not only to prevent unauthorized use of proprietary products but also to give increased accessibility to them, when appropriate. To state the concepts of intellectual property protection for plants is relatively easy. Development of the "Farmers' Rights" concept among some third world countries also has been an attempt to find ways of giving a measure of profitability to those in the developing countries that have in hand diverse and potentially useful supplies of plant germplasm. With regard to plant variety protection, industry hopes to have tighter legal controls over unauthorized reproduction and sale of its protected varieties. Future expectations of industry in regard to intellectual property protection for plant materials are in at least two areas: plant variety protection and utility patents.