Plant patents sow fear among small growers

I spent some time working on a seed swapping startup idea a couple years ago, and it&#x27;s a fascinating topic. In the UK there is also a law which states you can&#x27;t sell seeds unless it&#x27;s registered [1], and out of maybe 4000 tomato varieties the government has approved only a handful.<p>This is terrible for diversity because as the climate change get worse, some tomato varieties might thrive better than others in heat, or drought, or have different disease resistance... but because they are illegal to sell the seeds it&#x27;s difficult to keep the different species alive and we could run into trouble in the future when we realise these government approved varieties don&#x27;t work in warmer or colder climates.<p>There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don&#x27;t want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm.<p>Those laws may not exist in other countries but the patents could stop diversity in the same way, but long term it&#x27;s important to keep these weird varieties of seeds around for diversity.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;life-style&#x2F;food-and-drink&#x2F;features&#x2F;forbidden-fruit-5353568.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;life-style&#x2F;food-and-drink&#x2F;feat...</a>

This is the American dream. Software patents, plant patents, patenting straightforward things, patent trolls. Not to mention sick health care system. I once wanted to move to US, but many years ago realized it&#x27;s a sick country.

Patents shouldn’t exist that broadly. You shouldn’t be able to patent rectangles as the shape of the phone, making anyone else unable to build a rectangle phone. You shouldn’t be able to patent curly leaves on lettuce so that no one else can have curly leaf lettuce unless they buy from you.

I love growing (and eating) Frank Morton’s lettuces. If I recall correctly, a lettuce variety he bred was grown in space. Here’s a good podcast interviewing him, also touching on Open Source Seeds and patents: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osseeds.org&#x2F;free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumple-waved-lettuce&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osseeds.org&#x2F;free-the-seed-podcast-03-hyper-red-rumpl...</a> there’s another good episode on the Seed Grower podcast too.

&gt; When a company is granted a utility patent on a type of seed, it doesn’t just own the seed. It also owns its traits (color, texture, ...<p>&gt; So, if a plant breeder like Morton develops his own variety of lettuce and the lettuce matches any of the traits of a patented variety – whether it be color, the curliness of the leaf or a trait that makes it conducive to a particular climate – the breeder is technically in violation of patent law and risks getting sued by the patent owner.<p>&gt; &quot;They are essentially just doing obsessive-compulsive descriptions of plants and laying claims to those traits, so if anyone else has those traits, they are in violation&quot;

The good news is that patents expire. After that the knowledge becomes public domain. So, once they expire, we all benefit.

I see corpocracy coming up, and this will be worse than robots taking over the world