Naming Archives - PlantLaw.com

COMMON BUT VERY AVOIDABLE MISTAKES IN PLANT PATENTING

Protect Those Cultivars, But Do It Right

Plant breeders must devote many years and tremendous effort to develop a new plant variety with strong commercial potential. In order to protect all that effort from illicit copying (propagating), many choose to seek protection under the U.S. plant patent system. There are some common mistakes that many breeders (and attorneys) make when they are first learning how the plant patent system works. The three most common are (1) naming the variety in a way that is incompatible with trademark protection; (2) misunderstanding the flexibility of filing-date and disclosure requirements; (3) incorrectly timing the filing of the application.

Don’t Mess Up Your Trademark Rights

When a plant breeder has spent years, or even a decade, developing a new plant variety and has finally made selections and propagation and gone through all the steps to really confirm that a variety has great commercial potential, it is not uncommon to be thinking almost entirely in commercial terms and to have a favorite “sexy name” for their new and exciting variety. The problem is that the sexy name is going to function as intended — in the capacity of a trademark associated with that variety. Trademarks are great, but the plant breeder also must select a “generic name” for the variety. And the tricky part is that the generic name is, by definition, a name that can be universally used in reference to the variety, without infringing anyone’s trademark rights.

Therefore, it is actually necessary for each commercial variety to have TWO names —

one is the generic name and one is the trade name. This might make sense in the context of trademark law and policy more generally. Trademarks are not allowed to take generic words out of our everyday language and make them the intellectual property of one owner. Nobody could get a trademark on “Light Bulb,” for a light bulb, or “Doorknob,” for a doorknob, and then claim that everyone who used one of those terms was infringing their trademark. No, the people who use those terms are just speaking the language–using the best words the language has for the things they are talking about. That is what a generic term is. So trademarks CANNOT cover truly generic terms.

Now, applying this back to plant varieties, when a breeder designates the generic name for a variety, this is tantamount to saying “this is a name that anyone can use in referring to this variety, without bumping into any trademark rights — this is the best word for the public to refer to this variety.” And by choosing a generic name for a plant variety the breeder is essentially dedicating that name to the public and foregoing any later claim that the name is the breeder’s trademark. On the other hand, the breeder can also pick a trade name that is not the generic name and that the breeder or the owner of the variety has exclusive rights to use so that the public can identify that name with the sourcing quality of the variety.

In my experience as an attorney representing plant patent applicants and applicants for worldwide plant breeders’ rights, I have seen this mistake made more than once. When I have inherited files from a prior attorney or files that were handled by the breeder without counsel, I often see a name that looks like it would be a great trademark, but used in the plant patent application as a generic name; and then I know downstream frustrations will occur or already occurred, when the trademark application for that name is rejected because it is, by definition, a generic name. There are ways to fix this in the U.S., but the problem is an even bigger headache if the mistake is made under the international convention under which most other countries handle their plant variety rights.

Don’t Delay Your Filing Just to Disclose More – You Really Can Add It Later

Another common mistake, especially among applicants and attorneys who are more familiar with utility patents, is a belief that the application must be complete to obtain a filing date, and cannot be changed after the filing date. This is incorrect. It is possible to get a plant patent filing date with relatively little disclosure. For more details about that, click here. Likewise, it is possible, even very common, to add to the disclosure as part of negotiating the allowance of the application. Utility patents have strong prohibitions about adding “new matter” after the filing date, but adding a more complete description of a new plant variety, after the filing date, is not considered new matter, since it does not actually change the underlying thing being described (the plant variety itself). The goal is to describe it as completely and accurately as possible, and it is entirely permissible to file an application with some very basic information about the variety, and then supply more details later.

A variation on this mistake is filing what is intended to be a plant patent application, but filing it as a utility application. This is also something that has happened on some occasions when someone new to the process assumed that the two systems were the same, or were more alike than they actually are. The “formalities” required for plant patents, including fees and inventor declarations, are not the same as utility patent formalities. One of the first Cannabis cultivars that was the subject of an attempt to get a plant patent was originally mis-filed as a utility patent, which caused quite a lot of unnecessary delay and paperwork for the applicant. This is just one of those things someone who hadn’t previously filed a plant patent may not catch the first time around.

This misconception regarding how much you have to disclose to get a filing date can matter when some sort of commercial activities may put the patentability of the variety into question. Suppose a commercial sale of a large order of plants (clones) of the variety is about to be made, but someone has the mistaken notion that they need to have the complete, detailed information about the variety in order to be able to file the application. This would either unnecessarily delay the sale, pending the filing of the complete application, or it would cause the owner of the variety to believe that it is necessary to forego patenting in order to not delay the sale. In reality, it is usually possible (if not ideal) to file a plant patent application within a few days of deciding it needs to be done.

Know Your Deadlines and What Creates Them

This timing issue is a form of the third mistake — not realizing that a plant patent application can be filed even before all of the information that will eventually be required for allowance is available. The other form of the third mistake is filing too early. As noted in this post, developing a new variety takes a long time, and some of that time may involve test-growing the plants in various settings, trialing harvested material, even selling harvested material. If the breeding and commercialization team does not understand what leads to loss of novelty (public availability of asexual propagating material of the variety), and what does not (e.g., sale of harvested material*), the team can make the mistake of filing the plant patent application too early. Why would that matter? Because the patent will expire 20 years after the filing date, so filing no earlier than necessary will result in a longer practical term of protection.

Understanding what is unique about the plant patent system can help plant breeders and companies avoid these and other mistakes. So, to borrow a line from the notorious Christopher George Latore Wallace:

And If You Don’t Know, Now You Know

By Dale Hunt – The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his professional colleagues or his clients. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Meaningful legal advice can only be provided by taking into consideration specific facts in view of the relevant law.

February 1, 2019/4 Comments/by Dale Hunt

WHAT IS THE PUBLIC DOMAIN?

We Are Free to Use What Is In the Public Domain – It Belongs to Everyone

We’ve all heard of the term “public domain.” But what does it mean and how does it relate to intellectual property? The public domain can be thought of as everything that belongs to the public, rather than to any one person — things the public is free to use without encumbrance, having to pay a fee, or facing risk of a lawsuit. Knowledge gained by academic researchers or long-known to everyone is part of the public domain. We can all use that knowledge without paying anyone a fee. That is public domain. Likewise, the subject matter of an expired patent, or something that was never patented, is also part of the public domain*.

There are other things that are in the public domain that ‘belong’ to the public, such as free use of the language to communicate. Imagine if someone tried to trademark the word ‘joint’ for their marijuana cigarette product saying, “Now this word belongs to me and to my product and, if you use it, I will sue you.” No rational system would permit that, because it would take ‘joint’ out of the everyday vocabulary; that word is part of the public domain.

IP Should Never Take Something OUT of the Public Domain

What about a marijuana plant cultivar that has been

known and used for a long time? Can someone who is newly commercializing it (or something with its properties) successfully patent it or write patent claims that include such a cultivar within the scope of the claims? We are well-aware that people are trying to do just that. Our visceral reaction tells us this is wrong; and it is also rejected by public policy everywhere that patents exist. It should never be possible for a new patent to take something out of the public domain and to restrict its accessibility.

Sometimes people ask what qualifies for a patent, a trademark, or a copyright. The answer is usually somewhat instinctive: it must be something they created; it can’t be something that has already been around for a long time without that person’s contribution. This kind of instinctual analysis inherently reflects a notion that whatever has recently been created and has value is not part of the public domain and could at least, theoretically, belong to one owner. It is a very important part of intellectual property theory that, once something is in the public domain, intellectual property rights should never be allowed to take it back out.

Protecting the Public Domain from Encroachment by Overbroad Patents

This is the reasoning behind banning trademarks on any generic term; it is also the reason for only permitting patents on things that are new. So when a patent examiner is given a new application to review and determine whether the things that are being claimed are really patentable, he or she looks at the “prior art” — which is really just published information about what is already in the public domain. Part of the process of patent examination is to identify whatever in the public domain is closest to what is being claimed as an invention and, if it is too close, the patent examiner rejects the claims. So, in this way of looking at things, the patent examiner is protecting the public domain from encroachment by a patent applicant.

If something has been known, done, sold, or discussed so long and/or so widely that no one can legitimately claim it is still their own unique secret, that’s public domain — even if that thing (whether public, cultural, academic, or commercial) was never published. Of course, in some industries, the actual public domain and that part of it which is published are not very much alike.

The Problem of Public Domain in the Absence of a Detailed Published History

A great example of this is the marijuana industry, in which the lack of publication was associated with the illegality of the activities. Now that the activities are no longer illegal in many jurisdictions and people are applying for patents, the industry is facing this unique challenge. Patent examiners performing their normal search of relevant publications in the prior art have almost nothing to work with. The lack of relevant prior art can result in examiners allowing patent claims that cover public-domain subject matter, because there’s no prior art basis for rejecting claims that are that broad.

On the other hand, people who have been working in the industry for a long time are very well aware of things that were openly known in the industry but that were never published. Therefore, particularly in the situation of marijuana patenting, there is a large disconnect between what is in the ‘real’ public domain and what is in the prior art.

Coming back to the more general concept, the message regarding the public domain is that people really can at least start by trusting their instincts about whether something should be protected by a trademark, a patent, or a copyright. Is it really new, or does it already belong to the public? That’s the question. The answer gives us a good starting point for discussing whether something should be protectable in an intellectual property system.

* For purposes of brevity, I am using the term ‘public domain’ very broadly; there are exceptions and nuances I won’t go into here, since this is a blog and not a treatise.

By Dale Hunt – The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his professional colleagues or his clients. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Meaningful legal advice can only be provided by taking into consideration specific facts in view of the relevant law.

December 31, 2018/4 Comments/by Dale Hunt

Suppose you are a plant breeder. You know there is significant demand for a table grape that ripens two weeks earlier than anything currently on the market. Who wants to buy grapes imported from half a world away, where the seasons are different, or grapes that have been sitting in storage, if there could be a freshly harvested and locally grown alternative? The market price for the first local grape to ripen would be far above the average price in the middle of the season.

As a grape breeder you have some tools at your disposal. You have some varieties that do ripen early, but they taste bad and they don’t produce much fruit. You also have some varieties that have fabulous taste and are very productive, but that ripen mid-season when prices are lower. There is a lot of value in combining those traits; it’s worth the effort. So, you cross the early variety with the delicious variety. Will all the offspring be early and delicious? Definitely not — especially if there are several genes that each contribute a little bit to early ripening, and several other genes that contribute to the great flavor and the high productivity. You’re shuffling two giant decks of cards and hoping that, somehow, all the cards you want will end up in one hand. Good luck with that. But of course if you shuffle and deal enough times, eventually you’ll get what you’re looking for — maybe just once, maybe a few times.

So, you cross the two kinds of grapes and harvest thousands of seeds (we’re ignoring, for the moment, that you really want seedless grapes;

there are tricks to working with seedless grapes, but that’s for another article). Even though the seeds all came from the same cross, they are each as different as you are from your brothers and sisters; the same two parents can produce a nearly infinite number of possible combinations.

So you plant literally thousands — maybe tens of thousands — of seeds from this cross. You grow them all, but you know you can’t take a close look at all of them. And you know the ones that will be good commercially need to grow fast and be very healthy. So you mercilessly throw out 99% of the new grape plants and keep only those that are really great in terms of health and vigor. If you started with 10,000 seeds, you’re now down to 100 plants. And you know you’re not going to commercialize 100 different varieties, so there’s still a lot of selecting to do.

You start by letting these very healthy plants set fruit, and you watch for it to ripen. Maybe, if you’re lucky, ten or twenty plants will have fruit that ripens early. So you save those and discard the rest. Now it’s time to see if the fruit is any good. One plant has beautiful fruit that tastes horrible; another has delicious fruit but is such a strange color that nobody would ever buy it to learn of it’s great taste.

Again, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll end up with three or four plants that grow well and make delicious, pretty fruit that ripens early. You might just be onto something. So, you take cuttings from each plant and make 10 new plants from each variety; you need to see if these varieties can be propagated into acres and acres of identical plants that will all do what you want them to do. Maybe one of your varieties doesn’t like to be propagated, so you know you’ll never be able to make thousands of plants exactly like that one. Maybe one can be propagated with cuttings, but the offspring aren’t as vigorous. But, if you’re truly lucky, one of your special plants will be easy to propagate and will be stable and relatively uniform across thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of plants, and across several generations.

Now, and only now, do you really believe you have something with some commercial value. You grow more of them under different conditions and see what you can learn about the reliability of the ripening and the productivity. You do some market testing to see if people like them.

Can you guess how many years you have invested in this project — in making ONE new variety? It’s been at least five years and maybe ten or more. You put in all that work and finally have something very, very valuable to show for it.

Can you sell the plants to whomever wants to buy them? Remember, these plants were SELECTED to be easy to propagate. If you sell even ONE plant to someone who doesn’t respect your desire to recoup your investment in developing this new variety, that person could easily make tens, hundreds, even thousands of plants without paying you for anything more than the one plant you sold.

BUT, if you could patent that plant — so that nobody could make unauthorized offspring without paying you a royalty — your investment and work over all those years would not be lost.

Nearly a century ago, plant breeders convinced Congress that there was good justification and need for a patent system to protect newly developed varieties of plants. This was precisely because it takes so much time and effort to breed and select a new variety and vastly less time and effort to make illicit copies of it. And so the “plant patent act” was passed and became part of the larger body of patent law that had existed in the United States since the late 1700s.

As you can see, if there were no patent system covering new varieties of asexually propagated plants (plants made from cuttings of parent plants, rather than from seeds), there would have to be some other — probably complicated — ways of protecting plant varieties, or there would be very little incentive to make new varieties.

So this is the WHY. For the HOW, click here.

By Dale Hunt – The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his professional colleagues or his clients. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Meaningful legal advice can only be provided by taking into consideration specific facts in view of the relevant law.

December 19, 2018/0 Comments/by Dale Hunt

Plant patents provide a very important tool for people, companies, and universities to protect each new variety of plant they develop. Plant patents protect the developer’s exclusive control over asexual propagation of the new variety. For information about the effort that goes into developing a new plant variety, and the importance of plant patents, click here.

So if you have a plant variety that you want to patent, how do you do it? What do you need?

First, you need to name the variety. To do so, you give the variety a “generic name.” This is NOT the same as the trade name you intend to use for the variety. Do not use the attractive, commercial trade name in the plant patent application. For more on why it is important to avoid that mistake, click here.

A good generic name is one that makes it easy to identify the variety but that won’t even try to double as a trade name. If your name is Mary Smith, and this is a Cannabis variety that was originally bred in 2015, and you are patenting the third selection from 2015, the name could be something like MScann15-3 (Mary Smith Cannabis 2015, third selection). Pick a naming convention that works for you and that you can keep using for all the varieties you might patent. Some breeders name their selections as soon as they show some promise and then only patent a few of the named selections. It’s all about record-keeping and what works for you.

In addition

to naming the variety, you need to identify the parent plants, if you know them. When a new variety was developed via open pollination, you might not know; however, there is a requirement in the patent statute that you indicate the parents if you know them. Intentionally withholding or falsifying information about the parents can be considered “inequitable conduct” and can make the patent unenforceable. For more on that, click here.

You also need at least one or two color photos of the plant showing (if possible) its distinguishing features.

While these few requirements will not be enough to get a plant patent application allowed and issued, they are enough to get a filing date. So, if you’re in a hurry to get a filing date due to some impending commercial release of the variety, you can file with just this much information and add more details later. For a discussion on the theory behind why it makes sense to allow this “adding later” with plant patents but not with utility patents, click here.

If you’re concerned about achieving allowance of the patent as quickly as possible, as a higher priority than an early filing date, then it is important to include a very thorough botanical description of the variety. Each species of plant has its particular features that are most relevant for a botanical description. For example, the fuzziness of the fruit would be a relevant characteristic for peaches, but not for roses. The best way to know what characteristics to include in the detailed botanical description is to look up recent plant patents covering the same species as your variety. The description in an issued patent is, clearly, sufficient to meet the Examiner’s requirements. So that is a good place to start.

In some cases, it is not possible to provide as complete a botanical description as you may see in an issued patent. Perhaps, due to the time of year, you cannot measure the average weight of the mature fruit, for example. It is not uncommon to file an application with a mostly-complete description that still has a few gaps in it. This will result in a rejection by the Examiner, referred to as an “Office Action.” That is not as discouraging or hostile as it may sound. It is really just a letter indicating that more botanical information will be required before the Examiner can allow the application. In almost all cases, a response that endeavors to supply all of the information requested by the Examiner, or that explains why the requested information is not available, will result in an allowance.

In some situations, an Examiner’s search will find something about the variety that may have been published before the application was filed. This will raise the question as to whether the variety was publicly available prior to the filing date. If it was, then the variety may not be patentable.* The Examiner will issue an Office Action that includes a request for further information about the commercialization and whether (and when) plants of the variety were publicly available. Interestingly, if only harvested material was commercialized, but propagating material was never made available to the public, the variety could be patentable even many years after the harvested material was first sold.^ If the applicant can provide information indicating that plants of the variety were not publicly available prior to the critical date*, then the application will be allowed.

Once the application is allowed, there is a deadline to pay the Issue Fee and then, a few weeks later, the patent will be issued. Plant patents are designated with a five-digit number preceded by PP, for example PP12,345. The term of the plant patent is 20 years from the filing date; no maintenance fees or renewals are required.

A plant patent gives the owner the right to exclude anyone from asexually propagating the variety without permission during the term of the patent.

*For a more detailed discussion of when and how novelty for patentability is lost in US plant patent cases, click here.

^The current position of the Patent Office is that 1) novelty for patentability purposes is only lost when propagating material is made available to the public, and 2) the sale of harvested material prior to the filing date does not affect patentability. However, this has not been tested in court.

By Dale Hunt – The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his professional colleagues or his clients. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Meaningful legal advice can only be provided by taking into consideration specific facts in view of the relevant law.

December 7, 2018/4 Comments/by Dale Hunt

Protecting Your Cannabis Genetics in Canada and Internationally

Genetics, Grow Your Business, International Commerce, Naming, PBR, Plant Breeding, Plant Propagation, Trademarks, UPOV

Since I live and work in the US, my blog is obviously US-centric. However, I have helped plant breeders in many different countries obtain IP protection for their cultivars all over the world. In the US, protection for plant cultivars can be in the form of plant patents, utility patents, and/or USDA PVP registrations. In the rest of the world, the IP protection is more uniform, and is generally referred to as Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR) or, less commonly, Plant Variety Rights (PVR).

Plant Breeders’ Rights through UPOV in Nearly 100 Countries

In almost all countries where such rights are available, they arise under a mostly-standardized system known as UPOV (Union internationale pour la protection des obtentions végétales, or International Union for Protection of New Varieties of Plants). There are currently 75 members of UPOV, most of which are individual countries but some of which are groups of countries — like the European Union (28 member states) and the African Intellectual Property Organization (17 member states). Most of the EU countries are also separately members of UPOV, so the total number of countries that participate in UPOV — individually and/or through a regional authority — is currently 94. You can check the current membership of UPOV here.

This post is primarily for Cannabis breeders and mainly for Canadian breeders who are interested in protecting their

genetics that may include some cultivars that are seed-propagated and some that are clonally propagated. However, what is covered here should be informative for anyone interested in PBR, so don’t click away just yet.

Seeds and Clones – The Difference Matters

While the approaches for seed-propagated and asexually-propagated cultivars are very different in the US, they are not nearly as different in other UPOV countries, including in Canada. However, there are still some important differences in the requirements, cost, and planning required for making successful applications, especially foreign applications (anywhere you’re not! — you’ll see what I mean if you keep reading). So please be aware that you cannot treat your seed-cultivars the same as your clones when applying for PBR.

What are the differences and why do they matter so much? The main difference is that almost all UPOV countries require a so-called D-U-S test which requires viable plant material in the country where you are applying for the rights. DUS testing examines the cultivar’s Distinctness from other known varieties*, Uniformity of plants within the cultivar, and Stability of the cultivar’s traits from one generation to the next. (*If you’re curious about why I used the term “varieties” in one place and “cultivar” everywhere else in this paragraph, you may be geeky enough to enjoy this post.)

You Can’t Just Put a Few Dozen Clones in an Envelope

Since live plants must be examined, this is where the difference between seed-propagated and clonally-propagated plants becomes so important for applications outside your “home” country. Compared with living cuttings of a cloned parent line, seeds are obviously much easier to sterilize and ship while still viable, certify as being phytosanitary, and maintain dormant prior to testing. Such cloned cuttings are often referred to as “witness plants.” Usually, numerous live witness plants must be phytosanitary-certified (if they are to be exported), shipped, received, and test-grown in each country where a PBR application is filed. Clearly, this requires more planning and expense than preparing and sending seeds.

A few PBR systems require direct submission of the witness plants to the PBR office itself. Most, instead, require the applicant to certify that the plants

have duly arrived in the country by a given deadline, with proper phytosanitary certification;
have cleared any required quarantines;
are under the care of a designated nursery at a specified location; and
are available for inspection by the PBR authority upon request (or some variation on that general set of requirements).

There are even a few countries that will waive any requirement of local witness plants in lieu of certified DUS tests from another UPOV member country whose testing standards it recognizes as being trustworthy.

I will provide another, more-detailed post with some rookie mistakes, horror stories, lessons learned, etc., on adventures with clonally-propagated witness plants around the world. Having “ridden herd” on thousands of witness plants making their way to dozens of countries over a couple of decades, I think I’ll be able to come up with some DO and DON’T material. In the meantime, though, on to the rest of the PBR process:

For seed-propagated cultivars, in many countries the seed deposit you will be required to make is simply held in reserve by the PBR office, and you are still required to provide a place where plants grown from another batch of your seeds will be examined. So, in this way, the seed-grown plants are essentially the same as the witness plants discussed above — they are just a lot easier to get to the right place and get started growing, especially if they are crossing international borders and long distances and, perhaps, waiting until the next growing season to be tested.

The Forms – Not Too Bad, But Watch the International Details

For the most part, a PBR application is a series of forms. There are some general questions about the applicant, the applicant’s representative, the botanical name of the variety, the denomination (variety name), the breeder, prior commercial activity involving the variety, the origin and breeding history and ancestry of the variety, a statement about the uniformity and stability, and a statement about the distinctness from other known varieties. Depending on the species, there also can be much more detailed descriptive forms that ask about certain morphological or functional characteristics that are important or useful in distinguishing among members of a given species.

There can be some major hiccups at the form stage — serious problems with providing the right documents to establish that the applicant has the proper authority to apply for the rights. This can happen especially if there is an earlier application in another country that is providing a priority date for the later application. Without going into too much detail, there are many international documentation hoops that one must jump through, in some countries, to get this part of the process out of the way; some things are similar from country-to-country, and some things are unique in each country. It can be a serious headache if you haven’t handled it before, so I definitely recommend experienced, professional help for this part of the process.

Provisional Acceptance, Public Comment, and Examination

Once the forms are filled out, reviewed, accepted as being complete, and the deposit of seeds or plant material is received and verified, the application is “provisionally accepted,” published, and moves on to examination. In Canada, the details of the application are published in the quarterly Plant Varieties Journal. An application cannot be eligible for grant until at least six months after it was published, thus giving the public six months to object to anything in the published application.

DUS testing usually begins after the application formalities are complete and the application is published. For DUS testing, an examiner may choose to make one or multiple visits to the designated site where the seeds have been planted or the witness plants are being grown. In any case, the examiner will examine the plants in detail to compare them with reference varieties (to verify distinctness) and will examine individuals within a population of plants of the cultivar, to verify their uniformity. The examiner will also assess the stability of the cultivar, either by making multiple visits to check different crops or cycles or by assessing stability within a population in a single cycle, if such a determination seems feasible under the circumstances.

One PBR Granted, Now Take On the World

If the cultivar is found to have the requisite distinctness, uniformity, and stability, and the application has been published at least six months, it can move on to being granted. There are some other formalities required before the Canadian PBR can be granted. One interesting requirement is a statement confirming that no Canadian trademark or similar indication has been, or will be, applied for or received for the denomination (cultivar name). If this seems odd, you should read this post.

There are many more things to consider when developing an international strategy for protecting a valuable seed bank or collection of genetics or clones, of whatever kind of plant with which you work. This is a brief (and simplified) overview of one country, using Canada as an example. As soon as your business expands to two countries, things become more complex; it becomes essential to track the first date of commercialization in each country where there is any commercialization, and to be aware of every country in which you’re operating or may want to operate. And you need to track and plan commercial activity not only in terms of propagating and growing, but also in terms of potentially selling harvested material and making products from harvested material. Very quickly there are numerous moving parts; watch for more blog posts to follow addressing some of them. In the meantime, you can click here to contact the author.

By Dale Hunt – The opinions expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of his professional colleagues or his clients. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Meaningful legal advice can only be provided by taking into consideration specific facts in view of the relevant law.

My thanks to Eric Lundgren, JD, for helpful input on this post.

November 26, 2018/2 Comments/by Dale Hunt

Patenting and the Public Domain

Protecting Your Cannabis Genetics in Canada and Internationally

Dale’s Blog

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