- 期刊
The Plant Variety Protection for Crops in China: A Systemic Review from Application to Enforcement of Rights
摘要
China is one of the developing countries having large agricultural research system with significant plant breeding capabilities. However, constrained seed markets, ineffective intellectual property rights, and various government regulations hampered the development of its seed industry. The Chinese State Council issued a statement in 2011, which was considered the inception of China’s recent reform on its crop variety regulation. Among other measures, the State Council instructed to enhance the enforcement of protections on plant variety rights. Our study examined the trend of applications and approvals of plant varieties for main crops in China, as well as the features and legal consequences of infringement lawsuits involving crop varieties. In this study, the data concerning the application and examination, and the approval for nationwide planting of crop varieties were retrieved from the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture. The court decisions concerning plant-variety infringements were retrieved from a legal database, Westlaw China. This paper contributes to reveal the effect of the reform on crop variety regulation and the enforcement of plant variety rights in China. In particular, although public institutions remains the main force for developing new crop varieties in China, only in a small number of infringement cases they were the sole plaintiffs. It suggests that a significant number of crop varieties owned by public institutions were licensed to private companies.