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Comment by werdnapk | Hacker News Reader

If 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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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)

You could graft a young tree to a mature one to decrease the time to market.

Again, not an expert, but I believe you need to graft a cutting from a tree that already bears fruit onto rootstock. Only the inventor of the new seed variety would have a fruiting tree.

You graft a bit from a small tree, to a much more mature rootstock, so the time to market is a lot of less than trying to grow a small tree from start. So like 1-2 years instead of 10+ years. Yes, you still need to get the scion from someone that has them because apples don't breed true, the only true one is the original that all the others are grafted off of.

> 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.

>you cannot steal genes.

Why not? You can steal bits, unless you think copyright law's bunk as well. You can even steal ideas (patents).

You can steal neither of those. You can copy them and in some specific cases copying bits or letters or some other human creative work might be unethical, in a lot more cases it can be illegal, but it is not theft.

The basic purpose of patents is to make it worthwhile to develop something new and valuable. They are unnatural - but useful. Working backwards, if we want people to spend time and money developing new breeds of plants, you arrive at these kinds of rules.

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