alt Hacker NewsIf you spent decades doing selective breeding to obtain a more desirable product, you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product from you and made money off of your hard work.
If the products are being bred from tax funded programs, then yes, anybody should have access to the new breeds, but if it's privately funded, then why should it be available for everyone? Without the protection, there isn't much incentive to invest time into developing better foods.
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> you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product
For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes.
> then why should it be available for everyone?
Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.
But you can't just take a seed and make a new plant of same characteristics. Now I'm not sure if that's the case for nectarines but apples mutate massively between seed and plant that made it so basically all plantations are clones or clones + grafts.
You'd have better luck "stealing" it with some wire cutters and cutting some shoots off the trees
If someone grows a new tree from seeds after buying your fruit, their trees will take several years to bear fruit right? Works almost like a patent anyway.
(I don't know fruit growing well so maybe that's not true)