Contents
Have you bred a superior disease resistant plant? Or developed a plant with high vigour and predictable outcomes? If you’re breeding unique varieties of plants, you might want to ensure that only you can commercially benefit from your plants.
Plant Breeders’ Rights enable growers to have exclusive rights to sell, export or produce their unique variety.
Plant Breeders’ Rights are a type of Intellectual Property that lets you market your registered plant variety for a period of 20 years.
Why Do I Need Plant Breeders’ Rights?
If you want to profit from your invention, Plant Breeders’ Rights can give you a competitive advantage over the market — enabling you to be the only supplier in the market for a set period of time.
Registering your right gives you the ability to:
- Produce or reproduce the plant variety
- Condition (clean, coat, sort, package and grade) the material for propagation
- Sell the plant variety as a product
- Export the material
How Do I Register Plant Breeders’ Rights?
To register Plant Breeders’ Rights, you’ll need to go through the following process:
- Conduct a Plant Breeders’ Rights search.
- Confirm you meet the requisite time limits. You can only apply for these rights if the plant variety has been commercialised in Australia for less than 12 months (this is called the ‘eligible sales period’).
- File Part 1 of your application. Here, you have to provide your details, give information about the plant variety and its origin, and make an initial case for eligibility.
- Nominate a qualified person to support your application (usually an expert in a particular plant group).
- Conduct a growing trial and get provisional protection for your plant variety, which must be conducted with your qualified person.
- File Part 2 of your application to get full and ongoing protection for your plant variety.
How Do I Use Plant Breeders’ Rights?
Plant Breeders’ Rights are just one type of Intellectual Property. You may also be able to use Plant Breeders’ Rights alongside other types of Intellectual Property protection, such as patents and trade marks.
Once you have registered your plant variety, it includes the protection of the propagating material of the variety itself and essentially derived varieties.
Essentially derived varieties are varieties of plants that share all essential characteristics of the registered plant variety and could qualify for their own Plant Breeders’ Right application.
Need Help?
Applying for Plant Breeders’ Rights can seem like a daunting task, particularly as there are many steps that need to be carried out.
Our highly experienced Intellectual Property lawyers can work with you to make sure you can protect your new plant varieties.
Contact us at team@sprintlaw.com.au or on 1800 730 617 to get help protecting your plant vareity. In the meantime, keep your invention on the downlow!
Get your FREE quote now.
We'll get back to you within 1 business day.
