Mericloning Neos/ Illegal or Culturally Prohibited

[Shoreguy]

I’ve heard various reports about this.

What is actually the case?

For sterile varieties such as N Shunkyuden, is a pass given or are they only propagated by division? The latter seems unlikely due to their moderate price.

[Ray]

Why would it be illegal?

[Shoreguy]

Ray,

It is financially advantageous because it keeps prices higher on existing stock by preventing the market being flooded with cheap imitations.

Same reasoning applies to making illegal the selling of counterfeit Gucci bags, Rolexes,etc.

[Leafmite]

With plants, if they are not patented/patent-pending, you can propagate them. When you buy the plant from a reliable grower, it is always indicated whether it is patented/patent-pending or not. I try to avoid buying patented plants but I have grown sweet corn and a few other annual veggies and fruits that have been patented. I have not bought perennial plants that are patented, though, as I fear I would forget and give away a piece.

[Shoreguy]

Leafmite,

I was referring to Japanese regulations and/or cultural attitude.

[orchidsarefun]

Enforcing a patent infringement must be near impossible as one could argue that the cloned plant wasn't patented and was a spontaneous look alike.

[Ray]

Originally Posted by Leafmite

With plants, if they are not patented/patent-pending, you can propagate them. When you buy the plant from a reliable grower, it is always indicated whether it is patented/patent-pending or not. I try to avoid buying patented plants but I have grown sweet corn and a few other annual veggies and fruits that have been patented. I have not bought perennial plants that are patented, though, as I fear I would forget and give away a piece.

"Giving away a piece" is not a patent violation. Selling it would be.

[Orchid Whisperer]

The website upcounsel.com says:
"A patent offers legal recourse for plant reproduction by use of cuttings, tissue culture, or any asexual means without the written permission or licensing by the inventor. Possession of illegally propagated plants of a patented species is infringement, even if the reproduction is inadvertent."

This says nothing about selling.

[Leafmite]

Originally Posted by Ray

"Giving away a piece" is not a patent violation. Selling it would be.

If you grow corn that is patented, you cannot even save the offspring to plant the next year. When I grew it, they had specific instructions about not planting other types of corn nearby, etc. And, yes, giving away pieces is definitely not permitted.

Personally, I do not think that living things or parts of living things should be patented. Now that we are getting close to genetically altering people to avoid genetic illnesses, this precedent might get a little weird.

Farmers often save seed to use the following year. Apparently, according to a lawsuit won against farmers, you cannot save the seed from patented varieties to use the following year, even if they are no longer have the pure genetics of the original seed. This means that, every year, farmers need to buy new seed.

[Hakumin]

Mericloning of Neos is not illegal and I am not aware of any pure Neo cultivars that are patented.

Mericloning however is often seen by Japanese collectors to be a bad thing mostly because of it's potential ability to drastically drop the price of certain expensive sterile varieties.

Mericloning of Neos is not yet very well developed however. I have spoken to several Korean and Japanese breeders regarding this and they have said that mericloning of neos is actually very difficult, and it has not yet been done successfully many times. And those breeders were not aware of any mericlones that have yet been sold into the general market. I know that one breeder in Japan is currently working on some mericlones of Hanamatoi, and the first few have recently bloomed.

All that said, mericloning of plants with chimeral variegation is not such a simple thing. If you try to mericlone a periclinal chimaera such as many fukurin varieties, you won't end up with very many, if any offspring with the same type of variegation. They will all turn out solid green or solid yellow, with perhaps a few shima ones. This is because this type of variegation is caused by the organization of two genetically different cells within the meristem. Without preserving the organization of those cells in the meristem in relation to each other, you don't get the same type of variegation.

Because of this, even if mericloning were to become mainstream with Neos, there will still be some varieties that would still only be propagable via division.