Creating universal and sustainable access to plants and seeds: the role of clearinghouses, open source licenses and inclusive patents

Access to plants and seeds is key in the debate on food security and agrobiodiversity. The primordial question this papers seeks to address is what legal architecture can assist in achieving universal and sustainable access to plants and seeds, and in turning the exclusionary property regime into a more inclusive liability rule regime. The paper puts universal and sustainable access to plants and seeds front and center. A multitude of concepts and definitions have come to the fore in the debate on openness and access. Universal openness is defined here as access and use which is awarded to an indefinite number of users and where nobody can be excluded. Sustainability is defined here in relation to continuity, virality, infectiousness or perpetuity, where openness is passed on from one inventor/improver to another, thus establishing a chain of openness which can be endorsed amongst follow-on improvers The paper concludes that plant innovation can be made open and kept open via the dynamic interplay between inclusive patents and open source type licenses. Depending on the exact open source architecture, openness can be universal (inclusive patent + permissive open source license) or also sustainable (inclusive patent + copyleft license) establishing a perpetual chain of openness

ISBN:978-1-138-08758-3

Publication year:2018

BOF-keylabel:yes

IOF-keylabel:yes

Authors from:Government, Higher Education