VARIETY DENOMINATION ACCORDING TO PLANT BREEDERS' RIGHTS

U. Löscher
According to the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants and the respective national laws of the member states the variety shall be designated by a denomination destined to be its generic designation. The denomination must enable the variety to be identified. Therefore special rules have to be fulfilled. Free use of the denomination even after the expiration of the protection must be ensured.

In 1961 the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants was signed by some European States in Paris. While at that time - nearly 25 years ago - only 8 European States were engaged, today 19 states have signed and most have ratified the convention revised in 1978 (Anon., 1978). Today 17 states are member of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV).

The content of plant breeders' rights will only be touched upon where necessary to understand the function of the denomination and the appropriate rules in the convention. I also refer to the report of a symposium on nomenclature in Geneva in 1983, especially to the report by Mr. Kunhardt of the Bundessortenamt in Hannover (UPOV, 1984a).

According to Article 6 of the UPOV Convention the application for plant breeders' rights must fulfil the conditions of distinctness, homogeneity and stability, and the variety shall be given a denomination as provided in Article 13.

That is easy to understand, because it has always been customary to designate plant varieties by means of names. Appropriate regulations on the nature of such names and their approval were based on the assumption that a variety name is an indispensable factor in trade, since it gave purchasers the possibility of effectively choosing the variety they desired.

The rulings for the denomination in article 13 of the UPOV Convention were originally made on the basic principles of the ICNCP, but the special aspects of variety protection and the relationship between variety denomination and trademark had to be taken into account.

The most important passages of the Article 13 in this context read as follows: "A new variety shall be designated by a denomination. The denomination of the new variety shall be regarded as the generic name for the variety. Such denomination must enable the new variety to be identified; in particular it may not consist solely of figures. It must

Löscher, U. (1986). VARIETY DENOMINATION ACCORDING TO PLANT BREEDERS' RIGHTS. Acta Hortic. 182, 59-62
DOI: 10.17660/ActaHortic.1986.182.6
https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1986.182.6
182_6
59-62

Acta Horticulturae