Dataset for 'Rebalancing the debate about the breeder’s exemption in patent law'

Innovation in plant breeding is cumulative. The breeder’s exemption in plant variety rights (PVR) law allows follow-on breeding to occur during the term of protection. However, the number of patents for plant-related inventions is rapidly increasing, creating obstacles for further breeding.

This has created momentum for introducing a breeder’s exemption in patent law. This article argues that the trend should continue, especially in jurisdictions that allow for dual protection of plant varieties by patents and PVRs. There is still debate about whether patent law should adopt a full breeder’s exemption that would allow commercialisation of new plant varieties containing patented inventions.

The debate has been underpinned by two assumptions. The first of these is that the main barrier to adoption of a full breeder’s exemption is the TRIPS Agreement. This article argues that the hesitations about compliance with the TRIPS Agreement are based on outdated decisions that failed to correctly apply the international rules on treaty interpretation.

Secondly, it is assumed that a full breeder’s exemption in patent law would simply mirror the exemption for PVRs. This is not the case, as it ignores the emergence of the essentially derived variety concept. Therefore, a full breeder’s exemption in patent law would need to find support from other areas of international law.</p><p dir="ltr">This dataset relates to the section of the article that is concerned with the issue of dual protection by both patents and plant variety rights (PVRs), which can undermine the breeder's exemption.

It identifies instances of dual protection in Australia and the United States, providing key identifying information about granted patents for cultivars and any corresponding PVRs. It contains:</p><p dir="ltr">(1) A README text file with further details about the methodology and data sources.</p><p dir="ltr">(2) CSV file called 'US data for Rebalancing the Debate About the Breeder’s Exemption in Patent Law', with 16224 rows (including headings) and 15 columns.

Each row contains information about a granted US utility patent that claims a plant variety.</p><p dir="ltr">(2) CSV file called 'AU data for Rebalancing the Debate About the Breeder’s Exemption in Patent Law', with 176 rows (including headings) and 13 columns. Each row contains information about a granted Australian patent application that claims a plant variety and was filed after plant breeder's rights became available in Australia (i.e., 1988). </p><p dir="ltr">The dataset is significant because it is the first open access research that documents the overlapping intellectual property rights for plant varieties, and does so for all plant species (as opposed to the focus on a small number of species, such as soybean in MacDonald et al. 2023, for which the underlying data is not publicly available).

This allows policy debates and academic discussion about the impact of plant intellectual property to be informed by empirical, species-level data rather than extrapolating from the trends for a limited number of major crops. Other scholars may wish to build upon this dataset to track changes in plant intellectual property strategy in the future, or adapt the methodology for research on dual protection in other jurisdictions.

The dataset also allows readers to validate certain empirical claims in the article "Rebalancing the Debate About the Breeder’s Exemption in Patent Law." </p><p dir="ltr">

Note

The whole dataset was produced by manually searching and recording the relevant information, accelerated only by the bulk download options for metadata on each patent database. No artificial intelligence (AI) was used at any point to compile the data. Any errors or omissions in the dataset are entirely the fault of the human author.</p>