Plant Patents in the European Union: Recent Developments

Biotechnology has become one of the most promising and important technologies for the development of innovation in agriculture. The economic importance of the invested resources justifies that innovators ask for an adequate means of protection to compensate their efforts. There are two possible ways of protection of the developments in plant innovation: A sui generis system born in the middle of last century in order to protect the results of traditional breeding processes, on the one hand; and the patentability of plant inventions which normally are the result of biotechnological processes which operate at the cellular level. The coexistence of these two systems of protection in the European Union causes some frictions which have to be solved, not only by the legislator, but also by the courts and the patent offices when they apply the law to a constantly evolving reality.