Plant variety rights protect the specific variety. The revised regulations widen both the scope of protection and the acts it covers. Protection now extends from the propagating material of the protected variety to harvested material, and the acts covered extend from production, propagation and sale to processing for the purpose of propagation, offering for sale, import, export and storage. The right also reaches essentially derived varieties (EDVs), varieties not clearly distinguishable from the protected variety, and another variety produced or propagated through repeated use of the protected variety for commercial purposes.
Invention patents. A plant variety as such cannot be patented in China, but non-biological breeding methods, gene sequences and their applications, transgenic technology and molecular marker-assisted breeding methods can be.
For a variety with commercial value the two are usually combined: variety rights protect the variety, patents protect the breeding technology and the key genes, and trademark filings secure the brand function associated with the variety. Between them they cover both propagation infringement and technical infringement.
