Research On Intellectual Property Rights Of Agricultural Crop Variety

Pushed by parties interested domestic and abroad, China established regulations on the protection of plants new varieties (hereinafter referred to as "variety rights") in 1997 and joined in 1978 Act of the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants on April 23,1999, which took effect in due day. Since then, plant variety rights becomes another member in our intellectual property rights family. After finishing competing for industrial intellectual property, the developed countries moved to the agricultural field and focused their new round competition for plant variety intellectual property rights. Under this background, the paper showed up with a meaning practice in having a systematic study on intellectual property rights of plant variety.This dissertation made a systematic study on crop variety intellectual property right by means of comparative approach, quantitative and statistical approach, investigation approach, as well as theories and methods of institutional economics, technological economics, and industrial economics. It consists of 9 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction, it introduced the background, purpose and meaning of the study, reviewed the literature related to the study, and defined the topic of this study. Chapter 2 and 3 are the theoretical discussion. Analyzing evolution process, driving forces and roles of the crop variety intellectual property rights in the seed industry development, this section provided a theoretical support for the implementation of the plant variety rights. Chapter 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are the main parts of the study, focusing on variety technology R&D, property rights, commercialization, the section analyzed influence of the crop variety rights system and the decision-making of various parties involved from four aspects of variety R&D investment, variety rights application and maintenance, new variety commercialization, it provided a practical support for the implementation of variety rights system. Chapter 8 analyzed the development patterns and tendency of the plant variety rights system worldwide to raise challenges facing China and chapter 9 is the ending part of the study, it proposed an administrative framework for the government interested and detailed implementation strategy to solve various problems during administration of the intellectual property rights.Based on previous literature, the main contribution of this dissertation is as follows: Firstly, the paper analyzed systematically for the first time the influence of intellectual property rights on investment in new variety R&D and explored a quantitative approach to discuss the degree of such influence. Focusing on R&D progress - micro cognition of seed breeders - macro effect of R&D investment, the study had a statistics and quantitative analysis on the effects of variety R&D investment from three aspects of R&D investment level, structure, and coordination and innovation based on plenty of data investigated by the author, collected from Agricultural Department of China from 2003 to 2005 and information about China seed industry Top 50 from 1997 to 2002. Results indicated that the intellectual property rights encouraged the non-governmental...