1.2.2 Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement (TRIPS)
The TRIPS Agreement is relevant to Plant Breeder's Rights as it requires countries who are signatories to provide a system of intellectual property protection for new plant varieties and it also has minimum requirements for things which can be covered by Patents.
Under Article 27.1 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights “patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application.”
Article 27.3(b) allows governments to exclude some kinds of inventions from patenting, i.e. plants, animals and “essentially” biological processes (but micro-organisms, and non-biological and microbiological processes have to be eligible for patents). However, plant varieties have to be eligible for protection either through patent protection or a system created specifically for the purpose (“sui generis”), or a combination of the two. For example, some countries have enacted a plant varieties protection law based on a model of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV).
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