North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Philip Stewart <philstewart24@yahoo.com>]

I think in an ideal world, public breeding programs
would not patent cultivars.  I do think it interferes
to a degree with fulfilling their public mission, and
I think in some cases they have been handled very,
very badly. There are programs who have created huge
amounts of ill will through the way they've handled
their IP rights, and in some cases a lot of that is
well-deserved. But until states start supporting the
breeding programs adequately (and you could run a
whole program for a year on what it costs to fix an
intersection), we're stuck with a situation where
either we want a breeding program, and we pay for it
(at least in part) with royalties, or we don't have a
program at all. If that happens the amount of useful
breeding in the long-lived perennial species (like
fruit trees) is going to drop precipitously. There are
fine private breeders out there, but they are either
hobbyists with very limited time and resources (and no
likely successor to carry the torch), or businesses
with mostly short term goals in mind. We need the
public programs at very least to do things like
introducing new traits and exotic germplasm, because
these things just won't be done adequately by others.

The difference between reporting patent violations and
reporting marijuana in a cornfield is that the
marijuana likely affects only the grower. If I thought
the person who planted it was not the person who owned
the field, I would tell the owner, because it's
creating a legal liability for him. Cheating on
patents deprives breeding programs of their funding
and private breeders of their incentive to continue
breeding, thereby hurting my chances of having the
cultivar I need or want down the road. There are moral
and ethical reasons to do it too, but the simplest
reason is self-serving.

I don't support patenting natural occuring variants,
and I don't support patenting of non-synthetic genes. 
As a breeder, though, I feel that a new cultivar is
absolutely as much an invention as 95% of what goes
through the patent office, and anyone who has done
serious breeding knows that the same amount of effort,
thought, and resources go into producing a quality
cultivar as does any engineering project. I may not
have invented the plant species in question, but
neither have the people awarded most patents truly
invented anything...they're patenting refinements and
modifications, which is exactly what a new cultivar is.

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