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Coming To Plates In Europe: Patented Vegetables, Produced By Conventional Breeding (Techdirt)

The European Patent Organization (EPO) is a strange entity. Despite its name,
it has nothing to do with the European Union. Instead, it was set up on the
basis of the 1973 European Patent Convention to grant patents under that
Convention.

As an independent body whose only reason for existing is to oversee the issue
of patents, it has a natural tendency to widen their reach. One of the most
hotly-contested areas where that is happening is software patents, which are
not granted in Europe "as such" (you can imagine what fun the lawyers have
with those two words).

For its latest expansionist moves, the EPO seems to have cast a lustful eye
over the world of vegetables. Here's the background to the so-called
"broccoli" case from the EPO itself:

> _ British company Plant Biosciences was granted a European patent
(EP1069819) for a method for the production of plants whereby the level of a
potentially anticarcinogenic substance in broccoli plants can be increased.

French company Limagrain and Swiss group Syngenta filed notices of opposition
to the patent in 2003 and maintained their challenge in subsequent appeals.
They allege, among other things, that the patent protects an ...

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