14 GERMINATION.CA JULY 2017 PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE | PART 1 | CANADIAN PLANT TECHNOLOGY AGENCY PODCAST ALERT! Listen to interviews with Lorne Hadley and Bruce Harrison at germination.ca/protecting-rights-plant-breeders/ except directly from a lawyer. With larger, more damaging infringers, court proceedings would ensue. “We were successful in some large cases. We had one involving a distributor who looked to be a legitimate seed business. They were selling protected varieties from three different companies,” Hadley says. “We made an undercover purchase, gathered evidence, and our lawyers filed three simultaneous lawsuits against the infringer. The three CPTA members whose seed was being illegally sold shared a settlement of $240,000.” Bruce Harrison, senior director of seed breeding and innovation for Crop Production Services, was a CPTA board member from 1998 until 2005. He recalls those days when Canada was the Wild West as far as PBR went. “The industry was generally concerned about intel- lectual property protection, lack of certified seed use, and we were aware of the impact the illegal common seed use could have on ongoing investment and improved variety development for customers. We decided there was value in working together as an industry on tackling the challenge,” he says. Despite a shifting role, the Canadian Plant Technology Agency remains the action agency working to ensure intellectual property is respected. PROTECTINGTHERIGHTSOF PLANTBREEDERS AS THE 1990S drew to a close, the seed industry in Canada found itself with a problem. When the country passed its first Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR) legislation in 1990, seed industry stakeholders felt confident that new varieties and seed products would be safe from unauthorized sale. They were in for a rude awakening — no RCMP-style PBR police set up shop to patrol the country for infringers. The industry, it turned out, was more or less on its own. “There was a misunderstanding that government would assist in the enforcement of Plant Breeders’ Rights. That won’t ever happen. Responsibility for enforcement is always the responsibility of the rights holder,” says Lorne Hadley, executive director of the Canadian Plant Technology Agency (CPTA). “No one wanted to take it on. The act of enforcement is negative by its very nature. Lawsuits are filed against seed customers and so forth, and no organization wanted to do that.” So, there was a move to create a body to take up the mantel of PBR enforcement in Canada. The CPTA was born in 1997, and Hadley has been executive director since 2001. Unauthorized sales of protected seed varieties were rampant at the time. “We’d see 400 ads every year in local papers where people were selling seed in violation of PBR,” Hadley says. The CPTA model, he says, was modelled on an anti- piracy model used for software and music. “PBR is a complex area, and there was difficulty finding focus at first. PBR affects farmers — there’s a regulatory impact, there’s a constant need to look at the international sectors and ensure our domestic PBR law is up-to-date with the international standard,” he says. “It took a little while to get working. There were PBR cases done without the CPTA early on. Some succeeded, some didn’t. In 2006 we narrowed the focus down: we’d monitor the marketplace for infringements and look for people selling seed they shouldn’t be because they didn’t have permission of the variety owner.” CPTA developed a framework for enforcement. A minor infringer would be sent a warning letter from the CPTA. A medium-sized violator would get a similar letter, Lorne Hadley is executive director of the Canadian Plant Technology Agency. Photo by Alicia Leclercq Bruce Harrison served on the board of the Canadian Plant Technology Agency for seven years.