Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52EUROPEAN-SEED.COM I EUROPEAN SEED I 29 Plant Breeders´ Rights. Patents for plant innovations are considered by many to be evil, per se. Nobody has been able to explain to me why patents for life-saving pharmaceuticals are OK, but for plants they are evil, or why Plant Breeders´ Rights are so much weaker than patents. Regardless of these perceptions, we must face the fact that several countries in the world are not willing to provide effec- tive IP protection for varieties. It seems the resistance to protect agricultural crops, i.e. basic food crops, is higher than the resistance to protect ornamentals and fruits. However, in their IP laws these countries don´t differentiate between agri- cultural and horticultural crops. At least for ornamental and fruit varieties, CIOPORA sees no justification to have less effective protection than IP holders in other sectors. And we have prominent supporters. Josef Straus, emer- itus director of the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich and former head of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center, once said at a CIOPORA symposium, “With the exception of the necessity to access protected/patented material — even better provided for by deposits comple- menting written description for patents — no legal/economic justification exists to treat innovations/inventions and inno- vators/inventors of ornamentals and fruit trees any different than those in other areas of technology.” CIOPORA´S IP POSITIONS ARE DEMANDING It is well known that CIOPORA and its members are quite demanding when it comes to the level of IP protection for their plant varieties. This is because no other protection exists for vegetatively reproduced ornamental and fruit varieties — we do not, for example, work with F1 hybrids, which have a built-in protection against easy propagation. We have only IP protection. Recently vegetable breed- ers seem to better understand this, due to the fact that growers have started to vegetatively propagate seed crops such as tomatoes. In its three last annual general meetings in The Hague (2014), Hamburg (2015) and Lisbon (2016), CIOPORA has intensively discussed and approved posi- tion papers on several aspects of Plant Breeders´ Rights.1 The last piece of the positions was finalized in 2016 with the Position Paper on Essentially Derived Varieties (EDV). The new position of CIOPORA on Plant Breeders´ Rights now consists of six chapters, with the titles “Scope of the Right”, “Essentially Derived Varieties”, “Minimum Distance”, “Breeders´ Exemption”, “Exhaustion” and “General PBR Matters”. All of the posi- tions clearly demonstrate the desire of the CIOPORA members to have much more effective protection for their innovations and to have better defined regulations. There is not room here to elaborate on all issues in the existing PBR regime, so we need to focus on the main issues. While agricultural breeders seem to be mostly concerned about the farmers´ exemption (some call it farmers´ privilege or farmers´ right), CIOPORA and its members are con- cerned about the narrow scope of the PBR (which does not protect the final product but only propagating material) about the very complicated and unclear concept of Essentially Derived Varieties (EDV) and about too-small distances between vari- eties. A PBR LAW FOR ORNAMENTALS AND FRUITS MUST COVER THE FINAL PRODUCT An IP system, in order to be truly effec- tive, must cover all applications/products of the protected invention (as is the case, for example, in patents). The PBR system is the only IP system which covers only a part of the material of the protected inven- tion (the variety), namely the propagat- ing material. Harvested material is only protected under certain conditions. If it has been produced from legally obtained 1 http://www.ciopora.org/fileadmin/assets/pageDownloads/CIOPORA_Papers/CIOPORA_Position_Papers_on_PBR_2016/CIOPORA_Position_ Papers_on_PBR_2016.pdf THE STRUCTURE OF CIOPORA