Innovation in plant bioscience promises solutions for the most urgent and important contemporaneous challenges: Food security, renewable energy sources, and medicines. It is closely connected to relevant matters of humanity survival such as environmental protection, global warming, biodiversity, sustainable development and economic growth.
Intellectual property rights serve the major purpose of providing incentive to innovation. Simultaneously, these also interface with other areas of law designed to protect competing public interests, such as the protection of the environment and access to health.
In Europe the subject of patentability of plants is controversial in nature. Emerging technologies bring fourth further legal interpretation interrogations and ethical debates. Simultaneously, plant varieties rights, constitute an alternative and specific form of IP protection. There are different types of overlaps in the interface between these two normative frameworks.
This course offers a comprehensive study of this area of European IP law from a variety of viewpoints from potential rights holders, stakeholders and society at large. It complements the IP law curricular offering in a subject for which there is a demand for knowledge in the market place.
The course is taught from an inter-disciplinary perspective and is open to both law students and students or professionals of any other subjects wishing to learn about the legal framework for plant innovation. The course is anchored mainly on subjects of Intellectual Property Law. However Human Rights Law and regulatory frameworks concerning plant innovation will also be addressed. Basic knowledge on IP law is desirable but not a requirement.
Course plan:
1 – Introduction to legal thinking from an interdisciplinary perspective
2 – Plant Varieties Rights
3 – Patents on Plants and plant materials
4 – Plant science innovation and global governance
5 – Regulatory issues and marketing strategies
6 – Exam preparation
7 – Final evaluation
| Period | 3 Jul 2017 → 7 Jul 2017 |
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| Held at | Centre for Information and Innovation Law |
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- Plant innovation
- Intellectual Property Law
- Plant Varieties Rights
- Plant Breeders rights
- Patents on plants and plant parts
- Biotechnology and IPRs
- Synthetic Biology and IP law
- Nagoya Protocol
- Bio resources
- Gene editing in plants and IP law