Intellectual Property

An original strain is intellectual property of the breeder, the way a book is property of a writer and should not be reproduced without permission.

Since we are growing in a real legal grey area, we need to be a self policing community. The breeder often does not have the legal recourse to prevent knockoffs from being sold, as many breeders have to remain anonymous for fear of arrest.

Refuse to buy knockoffs! Itâ??s like the difference between burning a mix CD for a friend, and buying bootlegged videos off the street. If you want to make a few F2s and keep them as backup, or even give them to your best growing buddy, you have a reasonable right to do thatâ?¦ but to distribute them on a larger scale, or God forbid sell them for profit, is wrong.

This came from a thread that SubCool (an American breeder) started.

New Threadâ?¦ Part of Subcoolâ??s threadâ?¦
Jan-12-2007, 11:24
stinkyattic

Well I believe that ethically you should make every attempt to credit the original breeder if you are going to make a cross using his or her strain... for example, if I were to give you some seeds from a cross that I recently did with a really nice Afghani Dream that I got from a friend, and a Plan B Smashberry, I would give them to you with the heritage listed properly, just like the references in a scientific journal article, when you build upon previous research.

Now if I were to take those same Plan B Smashberry plants and just cross them to each other, that would be an F2, and I would not THINK of selling those seeds without the written permission of the original breeders, and would actually hesitate to even give them to friends since that strain is still on the market and I would be guilty of basically bootlegging their work.

I think that once the strain is off the market for whatever reason, such as the retirement of the breeder (which is the case with MasterGrown seeds selling BOG Bogglegum F2's recently on seedbay), if I had the original genetics I'd be happy to give them to friends at that point since the strain is unavailable, and to keep it alive, but it should be easier to convince the original breeder to allow production of the strain, again, WITH CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE, and selling knockoffs without permission is STILL highly unethical. Remember that bitch 420Mory? mm hmm....

See what I mean?