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Patents grant their owners the exclusive right to make,
use or sell discoveries and inventions, for a limited time. Utility patents,
plant patents, and plant variety protection certificates are all forms
of intellectual property that can apply to agricultural inventions.
• Utility patents can apply to all sorts of biotechnology
inventions, agricultural equipment and techniques, and many other inventions.
• Plant patents apply only to certain distinct
and new varieties of plant arrived at through asexual reproduction (grafting,
cuttings, and other methods).
• Plant variety protection certificates apply
to uniform, stable and distinct new varieties arrived at through sexual
reproduction or tuber propogation.
Field trials indicate regulatory release authorizations
of genetically modified organisms by USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service (APHIS).
Assignee indicates ownership interest stated in a patent,
meaning that the interest was declared to the USPTO at the time of the
patent award. The assignee often reflects the employer of the inventor.
Note that patent assignees in the database reflect ownership interest
in patent rights at the time of the patent award only; subsequent transfer
of ownership, licensing agreements and other forms of intellectual property
rights transfer are not described in the database.
Ownership indicates a majority or controlling interest
in an assignee at the end of a calendar year. Ownership histories in the
database reflect a considerable effort to consolidate publicly available
information from company press releases, news stories, and other sources
about changes in assignee ownership. These histories does not describe
all possible assignation of intellectual property rights, licensing activity,
or other forms of cooperation such as joint research enterprises. Entity
ownership—especially among private firms, but also among nonprofit
and governmental organizations—is sometimes difficult to establish
in given time periods; mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs and complex organizational
structures often obscure assignee ownership.
International Patent Classification (IPC) is an hierarchical
system used to classify, organize and search patents. According to the
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO),
which maintains the IPC, it also serves as an instrument for orderly arrangement
of patent documents, a basis for selective dissemination of information
and a basis for investigating the state of the art in given fields of
technology. The classification scheme contains 70,000
entries.
United States Patent Classification (USPC) is the system used
to determine examination for patent applications to the United States
Patent & Trademark Office.
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
is the agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce
responsible for examining patent applications and issuing U.S. utility
and plant patents.
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