ABSTRACT
Intellectual property rights are legal and institutional devices to protect inventions, patents, plant breeders’ rights, etc. They have never been more economically and politically important than they are in today’s industrial societies, nor have they ever been so controversial. Patents provide inventors with legal rights to prevent others from using, selling, or importing their inventions for a fixed period, usually twenty years. In a modern sense, patenting of plants, seeds, and plant parts does not appear to go much further back than the 1930s.
