Shifts in the use of utility patents and plant variety protection to protect plant intellectual property in the United States

摘要

Much of the recent concern regarding transgenic crops in the USA has focused on the ownership and control over seeds, particularly through patents and like instruments. However, patented plants need not be transgenic. These concerns are neither particularly recent nor confined to groups opposed to transgenics. Related issues have been expressed by public and seed company breeders regarding the effects of protecting plant intellectual property (IP) on cooperation and the exchange of information and materials among private and public breeding programs, as well as possible implications for germplasm collection, distribution and use in plant improvement. The concerns of each of these groups are very real and based, at least in part, on the perception of increased applications for utility patents for germplasm, cultivars, and inbred lines. However, protection of plant intellectual property had been pursed in the USA via other strategies before the Supreme Court's 1980 Chakabarty decision made utility patents possible for life forms, including plants. So the issue is more properly the extent to which there is an increase in protecting plant properties and/or a shift in protection strategies, as well as the extent to which these changes are spread across companies and over crops. One of the factors making assessment of these concerns so difficult is the near absence of data regarding the shifts in the types of property protection strategies being used, and of understanding of the reasons why private firms in particular have chosen to increase the degree of patenting of plants. The goal of this presentation is to use patent, PVP, and related data to document shifts in IP protection use over time within the USA. This analysis provides an understanding of how plant protection strategies have and are being used, the implications of their use for future plant improvement, and relevance to current concerns regarding protection of plant IP.