We sat down with Andrew Hallinan, Nurseryman (ex-sports turf manager) and Senior Examiner Plant Breeders Rights for IP Australia, for an overview on intellectual property (IP) and how plant breeder’s rights can help grow your business.
“Broadly speaking intellectual property, or IP, is a type of intangible asset, or similar to, or quite often a part of, ‘good will’ as it is often called in business. It is a product of your own creativity. It could be an invention or plant variety, an artwork, literary work, branding or many other things. For the turf industry, plant varieties and branding are probably the most relevant forms of IP.
“IP can be broken up a few ways. Firstly, rights and non-rights. An example of intellectual property that is not a right is a trade secret, like a secret recipe. The only protection you have with a trade secret is keeping it secret. Once it’s not a secret, you lose control and ownership.
Alternatively, IP rights such as copyright, patents, trademarks, designs, and plant breeder’s rights give you legally enforceable controls to protect your idea or asset.
Intellectual property rights themselves can be used to grow your business by accessing new markets through licensing arrangements or reinforcing brand recognition, and as a result, increasing revenue streams – opening up markets that you couldn’t necessarily access by yourself. You can also sell the property rights as an asset, and sometimes they can be worth a lot of money.
“Intellectual property is an important consideration for all businesses. IP gives businesses and individuals an opportunity to get recognition for, and derive profit from, your own ideas and creations.
Fundamentally it provides the incentive for turf breeders to invest their time and money into continuing to breed improved varieties. Improvements in turf varieties disease resistance, drought tolerance, wear tolerance and maintenance requirements among many others, would not have been possible to anywhere near the same extent if it wasn’t for the PBR system, as it allows for Breeders to recoup the costs that they have sunk into developing a new variety.
“If you are breeder, plant breeder’s rights give you the opportunity to profit from your plant breeding work. It gives you control of how a new variety is commercialised. It allows for the breeder to not only manage who grows the variety but allows you to more easily access other markets that were not necessarily open to you before, using licensing arrangements. Alternatively, you can sell your rights as an asset, just like you would sell a house or building, and make money that way – potentially allowing you to just focus on plant breeding.
“If you are not a plant breeder but are still part of the industry, it’s in your interest to know about plant breeder’s rights as well. The reason is, if you commercialise plant varieties without permission, you may be liable for both criminal and civil action, and penalties through the courts. This could lead to fines of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, it’s well worth doing your due diligence and knowing what you can and can’t do with regard to protected plant varieties.”
The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) is the umbrella organisation that our PBR legislation adheres to. This allows for Australian breeders to protect their varieties across most of the world. It also allows the best breeders from overseas to introduce their varieties to Australia.
The PBR process requires that we describe all new varieties and how they are different from other varieties. These are then published in the plant varieties journal and are generally done using internationally endorsed technical guidelines for different plant types to standardise how they are described. To date there has never been an internationally adopted technical guideline for any of the common turfgrass species.
This is about to change as Australia is leading the development of the new Technical Guideline for Couch Grass (Cynodon sp.).
Initially developed between local turfgrass breeders Peter McMaugh and Don Loch, and myself. We are now, with the generous help of Lawn Solutions Australia (LSA), collaborating with Dr Brian Schwartz of the University of Georgia. The goal is to produce a guideline that provides a clear and standard way to describe new varieties of couch grass leading to streamlined introductions of improved Australian and international varieties to the industry for the continued benefit of breeders, growers, turf managers and homeowners.
Initial meetings were held at LSA’s research and development facility at Jaspers Brush, NSW in May. Not only are we now able to receive input from one of the world’s leading turfgrass breeders, but also have the ability to test and further refine the guideline against extensive collections of US varieties. This is a great result for turf breeders and the industry.
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