Study On PVR Holders' Decision-Making In Infringement Cases Under PVP

Plant Variety Protection (PVP),a form of IPRs for plant varieties,can stimulate innovations in plant breeding and facilitate the dissemination of innovations,and concerns about national food security and domestic agricultural supply.However in flood of the case of infringement of intellectual property rights existed in china's seed market,damaged to seed market order,harmed variety rights holders'benefits and undermined the institutional effect of PVP.The paper provides a rights holder's perspective to analyzed several approaches to safeguard variety rights and the factors influencing the selection of the approaches.Furthermore,these results could be used as a source in finding out problems existed in current PVP system,and providing theory and empirical supports for perfecting variety protection institution.Firstly,in combination with the introduction of the course of the application of intellectual property rights (IPRs) to new plant variety in China,this paper describes the legislative condition the formation of basic right and approaches to safeguard variety rights,and then by using the data from Chinese ministry of agriculture (MOA),we know that: large numbers of infringement case existed in seed market and induced serious losses to variety rights holders;infringer was always private sector including private company and individuals;rights holders inclined to negotiate with infringer by themselves;the effect of safeguarding was evaluate badly etc.Secondly based on the hypothesis of profit maximization,we designed a decision-making model to analyze rights holders'choices of approaches to safeguard.The equilibrium of model shows: the factors influencing the choice of the approaches to safeguard variety rights lies on penalties for variety infringement;efficiency of state safeguard approach and negotiation power of rights holders. Thirdly the study employ transaction cost theory to analyze how transaction cost occurred in state safeguard approach affect the choice of the approaches to safeguard variety rights.The results suggest location of rights holders,losses from infringement,the result of safeguarding last period are negative correlation with the probity of state safeguard approach selected by variety rights holders.At last,this paper put forward: (1) by increasing the penalties for variety infringement,to increase expected benefit of rights holder and the cost of infringer;(2) grant the administrative departments of agriculture at country level or above to handle of infringement of variety rights;(3) reform of scientific research system in plant breeding sector,setting up an effective operating mechanism.