Guiding the hand that feeds: Toward socially optimal appropriability in agricultural biotechnology innovation

Recent innovations in biotechnology have produced many new, market-tailored agricultural products. Under current law, the developers of such new plant varieties have a number of options to protect their intellectual property rights. These options include utility patents, plant patents, state-law trade secret protection, and such private measures as product labels and contractual provisions. This Comment argues that none of the foregoing options is entirely satisfactory, and that the law must achieve a better balance among the property interests of the developers, the need to encourage further innovation in plant varieties, the preservation of competition in the seed industry, and the prevention of such environmental harms as genetic uniformity and genetic erosion. To this end, the author proposes amendments to the Plant Variety Protection Act that would strengthen the protection afforded to plant breeders, but shorten the period over which that protection extends. These amendments, the author contends, would insure profits for the developers of valuable plant varieties, thus providing an incentive for innovation, but would also promote competition in the seed industry by making new developments widely available for use in spurring further innovation, which in turn can help to reduce the threat of genetic erosion and genetic uniformity.