Plant Variety Protection (PVP)
Overview
The new plant variety protection (PVP) system is one of intellectual property right protection systems, which is designed to grant an exclusive right to breeders for their new varieties of plant.
With the introduction of the new PVP system, the seed industry is attracting increasing attention as an important industry that creates high added value. Consequently, global competition to secure agricultural genetic resources and to develop new varieties has arisen and in such a trend, countries around the world endeavor to foster the high value-added seed industry and protect their sovereignty over seeds.
In line with such trend, Korea introduced a system to protect new varieties of plant in 1998 and joined the international organization titled “the Union for Protection for New Varieties of Plants” (UPOV) in 2002. Since then, Korea has made remarkable steps in protecting plant varieties as witnessed by the expanded range of protected crops and an increase in the accumulated number of applications for protection of varieties. In addition to an effort to ensure a systematic protection of new varieties of plant and their breeders, Korea established and promulgated the Act on the PVP (“PVP Act,” effective as of June 2, 2013) separately from the existing the Seed Industry Act to stipulate the procedures of application, examination and registration of new varieties of plant and the protection of the rights of breeders in detail.
The PVP Act strengthened protection for new varieties of plant and the right of breeders. Under the PVP Act, for example (i) the protection of new varieties of plant under the law is expanded to cover all kinds of plant (ii) the amount of late payment fee for variety protection is different depending on the period of delayed payment to the extent not exceeding the amount twice as much as the variety protection fee payable (iii) it is possible to recover variety protection right by making up for and paying the variety protection fee even after the expiry of additional payment period and (iv) the criminal punishment for infringing variety protection right becomes severe to the level of patent infringement. With the adoption of the PVP Act, it is expected that fostering new varieties of plant would be promoted in the private sector and more investment and other efforts for new varieties of plant would be made.
BAE, KIM & LEE IP provides services in the plant variety protection area regarding matters such as application for and registration of new varieties of plant and enforcing the right against potential infringers based on their experience and expertise accumulated by handling many applications and dispute resolutions in various areas of intellectual property rights.
