In article ,
Sacha writes:
|
| Not entirely - I am aware that some people think plants don't 'belong' to
| anyone but if that attitude prevails, new hybrids and new varieties simply
| will cease to come along.

Which is why there were so few new varieties developed before that
law was passed? Oh, come now!

| It costs someone money to produce them on a small
| scale for evaluation and then a large scale for selling and that someone or
| someones have the law behind them in terms of having the right to be paid
| for their work through royalties.

That is true.

| I think I do know your attitude to this because I think you expressed it
| once before when this came up but I might be misremembering.

No, I have never expressed it on Usenet, let alone on this group.
It is not what you think, and the reason I have never posted it
is that my views on the matter are too complex and philosophical
for such a medium.

| You are not allowing for e.g. Mail order sales. If a plant is not available
| locally, which this illegal one would be, most people who really want it
| will find somewhere to obtain it by mail order, as we see on here quite
| often. They then buy it from a nursery which has paid its dues to the
| supplier which get passed back to the breeder.

Yes, I am. What you say is true, but you are assuming that all 144
people really want that variety - and remember that the context was
that it was being sold as an UNNAMED variety. I doubt that, of those
144, more than a dozen would buy the named variety if they had not
bought the unnamed one in a charity sale.

| We could argue this 'til the cows come home and I'm not prepared to bore us
| all with that. I'll content myself with saying to the OP that selling a few
| PBR protected plants for charity almost certainly won't upset anyone but
| making your own sideline business out of someone else's PBR protected plants
| almost certainly would.

Oh, yes, quite agreed. That is a very fair summary.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.