4.10 NAMING A NEW VARIETY

Under the Plant Breeder's Rights Act 1994, both name and synonym of a plant variety are protected. A synonym is an additional name which the applicant may also use to commercialise the variety in Australia. However, acceptable variety name and synonym must comply with Section 27 of the Plant Breeder's Rights Act 1994 and the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants 2004 (ICNCP 2004) - the site for the ICNCP web site is only accessible to subscribers). For the purpose of this paper a reference to a name is also a reference to a synonym.

The PBR Act is consistent with Article 20 of the UPOV Convention (1991) “Variety Denomination”.

Contact the Plant Breeder's Rights office to check for the acceptability of the name before lodging an application.

If the new variety has not been named at the time of the application, a temporary code name will suffice. This can be changed at any time before the final granting of PBR by proposing a new acceptable name and paying a variation fee.

As noted in Section 2.2, it is important to distinguish between a variety name and a Trade Mark. The former identifies the variety for common usage and the latter should denote its trade origins.

The next section provides some rules for Naming a new plant variety for the purposes of PBR.

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