The Community Plant Variety Office is to reduce the annual fee for granted Community Plant Variety Rights from the current level of EUR 300 per annum to EUR 250 per annum, with effect from 1 January 2014.

This is partly the result of lobbying by our friends at CIOPORA, the organisation for breeders of ornamental and fruit plant varieties. Breeders should consider joining CIOPORA if not already members.

Naming a new plant is a complicated business. Not only must the name be suitable for marketing the variety, it must also satisfy the requirements of the IP authorities to be considered valid.

In Europe, the Community Plant Variety Office offers guidance on the suitability of plant names. This guidance has recently been updated and can be found here: http://www.cpvo.europa.eu/documents/lex/guidelines/VD_Guidelines_explanatory_note_EN.pdf – PDF file (requires Adobde Acrobat Reader).

In any case, we always recommend that breeders take great care in choosing a name for a plant. PFE would be pleased to offer our advice and opinion on the suitability of a plant name. We also usually recommend filing Community Plant Variety Rights applications using a code name, so that different marketing names and trademark names can be used on the plant label.

Here’s an interesting news story.

Consider carefully the court’s judgement. The infringer has been selling a PVR-protected plant variety under false identity. The court has found in favour of the rights owner. As punishment, the infringer must pay compensation (to be determined), the infringing crops must be destroyed immediately and details of the case are to be published in the trade press.

So, infringing PVR not only costs you cash, it costs your plants and costs your reputation.

Is it a price worth paying?

Be assured, that PFE will work with breeders to take appropriate action against any infringement of PFE-managed varieties. You’d be daft to risk it.

The CPVO has managed to keep it quiet, but we’ve finally received official notification of something that we have known about for quite a while – the application fee for EU Plant Variety Rights is to be reduced from 1 January 2013 from the current level of EUR 900 to a new fee of EUR 650 – a saving of EUR 250. This will result in somthing like a 10% reduction in the total cost of obtaining a CPVR for those varieties where only one cycle of DUS examination is required.

We continue to recommend that variety owners defer making applications until after January 1 to take advantage of this new rate, provided that this would still ensure that the application is received by the CPVO not more than 364 days after the first offer for sale. There are also often other good reasons for deferring an application until after the first sale, particularly if it can be deferred until after December 1 in any calendar year, for reasons that we would be pleased to discuss in confidence with any prospective applicant.

Which all leaves one question – why has the CPVO not publicised this fee change more widely? It is not mentioned on their website, neither on the front page, nor on the “news” page, nor on the page detailing applicable fees (which is already out of date, referring to the paper form of the Gazette, which has not been issued for quite some time). It almost makes you think that they don’t want potential applicants to know that they could save money if they wait three months!

We frequently hear of IP scams that are doing the rounds – attempts to fleece the owners and users of IP by unscrupulous individuals and organisations. But this week, for the first time, we met a trademark scam “in the flesh” when one of our customers received a letter demanding money to publicise the recent transfer of ownership of a trademark.

Of course, such transfers are publicised in the official gazettes of the intellectual property offices concerned and this is included in any fees that are paid to them. So there is no need to further publicise it in any third-party publications, particularly as these publications have no official status.

The World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) has a useful webpage showing some of the scam letters that are currently doing the rounds. If you receive a letter that you think might be a scam, it would be worth checking against this list. Click here to visit the WIPO page.

I can report that our customer was savvy to the scam and wasn’t taken in, particularly after they checked back with us to see what we knew about it.

The Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO), the body that administers applications for European Community Plant Variety Rights, is in the process of becoming a paperless organisation. PFE has taken advantage of their online application filing system for some time.

Now, the CPVO has announced that it will soon cease issuing PVR grant certificates on paper. From Monday 23 April 2012, all grant certificates (plus decision notices and variety descriptions) will be available as electronic files with electronic signatures in the secure area of the CPVO website (the extranet). For an undefined transition period, the CPVO will also issue these documents in paper form in the normal manner, but at some future date, no paper forms will be issued except on specific request (which, we suspect, will attract an administration fee).

For our clients, PFE will download the grant certificates when they are issued and submit them electronically to breeders without charge. If breeders require a paper version, we will be happy to provide these without charge if we are in possession of the electronic document (it is not clear whether the CPVO will provide an electronic archive of grant certificates and related documents going back to 1995 – it would be around 100,000 documents, by our estimate, so a formidable task).

Applicants/PVR owners should also be able to access their own documents (and only their own documents) from the CPVO extranet if they have a log-in username and password. PFE can not obtain usernames and passwords for clients – application must be made directly to the CPVO. Please contact us if you would like advice on doing this.