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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

This is totally awesome. I would love to see these in person.

However, the one thing I really don’t like is this:

>Our Firefly Petunias are protected under patent, and as such, propagation and breeding are not permitted. These petunias are sold exclusively for personal use.

I think this is wrong, it should not be possible to patent life forms.

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From the nature article linked above: "When asked whether Light Bio is worried about plant lovers sharing cuttings of the petunia with friends, Sarkisyan says that although the firm owns patents for the technology, it doesn’t plan to crack down aggressively on the behaviour. “The most positive way of dealing with it is to come up with new, better products,” he says."

Luckily it is quite easy to clone plants!

https://www.flowerpatchfarmhouse.com/grow-petunias-from-cutt...

I'm sure they will go after stores that sell them but for the home grower, buy one and clone away.

Technically (in the US) it's only possible to patent plants and I think legally yeasts are considered plants.

This is "to promote progress in the science and useful art of agronomy".

Not defending it, just stating what the law is.

I initially reacted to it negatively, but on thinking about it I realize that glowing plants are about as natural as polyethylene factories, so I get the logic behind the patentability, and can even see some benefits. Hopefully the patent will reduce the total number of these abominations grown.

Well where on that spectrum does honeycrisp apple or Maui gold pineapple belong?

Somewhere in the middle. Honeycrisp apples are a combination of naturally occurring genes, but they are propagated clonally and in fact cannot reproduce true to themselves. They'd never have arisen without careful cultivation, and (this part is important) another group crossing the same original cultivars as the developers of the honeycrisp used wouldn't get the same apple. So it's a combination that is unique to its inventors, rather than a patent on something anybody could do - and nobody will infringe by accident.

An example of a bad patent would be a patent on a process anybody trying to solve the problem would come up with - that's a needless restraint on trade - and an example of a truly horrible patent would be one on a human gene. Those existed until 2013, when the supreme court finally ruled against them.

Seems arbitrary and liable to abuse due to the patent office gonna call it obvious to deny you the patent because the officer's friend has a similar patent.

The rule against a trivial invention already exists, but as you suggest, interpretation creates a huge amount of criticism for the patent system.

What you have just said about the Honeycrisp apple is true about all apples. That's how apple varieties have been created since the dawn of time. There's nothing special about Honeycrisp - they basically tried planting loads of seeds after crossing various trees with each other, did a massive taste testing and picked the resulting tree that won the lottery. Then that single tree was propagated by cuttings to make every single Honeycrisp apple tree in existence. But that's how all apple varieties are made.

Wasn't honeycrisp made with irradiated soil?

That's not mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycrisp or anywhere else I can find.

You could also argue that as honeycrisp were created by randomly crossing other varieties, and then picking the one appple with the most desireable qualities out of hundreds, this is not really patent-worthy as nothing was designed by the breeder.

The glowing petunias on the other hand were a proper invention, inserting a working, novel biochemical pathway into a plant is quite hard.

> Honeycrisp apples are a combination of naturally occurring genes, but they are propagated clonally and in fact cannot reproduce true to themselves.

All apple cultivars are like that.

https://theconversation.com/how-a-few-good-apples-spawned-to...

Order one glowing petunia.

Plant a cutting in the neighbor's yard.

Neighbor goes to jail.

Profit!

On the other hand “Pirating bioluminescent flowers” sounds metal as hell

Have you heard about Monsanto? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_affairs

Apparently plants have been patented already for nearly a century, I didn't know that: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2023/august/expanded-in...

But yes, its controversial, and for good reason. But so is most of IP law to some degree.

> it should not be possible to patent life forms

If you count plant patents as patents, then almost all commercially used asexually propagated plant cultivars are patented.

https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/apply/plant-patent

This is how rose breeders stay in business. They get the rights to profit off their work, time limited rights over the life form they created. Where it gets messy is people copyrighting stuff they didn't develop or breed, just what they happened to discover and analyze first.

> I think this is wrong, it should not be possible to patent life forms.

Consider that if they couldn’t protect their work, they never would have invested the money into making these and offering them for sale to begin with.

I understand why some might find it unpleasant, but the fact that these exist at all is a testament to why such protections are available.

It’s not, though. There is a perfectly viable market of seeds and such for non-biolumenescent plants. You can, in fact, plant watermelon seeds and use the seeds in the resulting watermelon to plant more watermelon plants. Crazy.

> There is a perfectly viable market of seeds and such for non-biolumenescent plants.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to argue, but the patent laws aren’t designed to patent generic, pre-existing plants like generic watermelon.

How is that crazy? That's how plants work.

This is not a natural plant though.

That's not really true for most popular high-performance varieties, most are hybrids and growing them from the harvested seed will lose the characteristics. That's why most commercial farmers buy from a supplier every year instead of saving seeds, and that's the reason for a viable market.

Commercial farmers also sign agreements to not plant harvested seeds. Monsanto has successfully sued several farmers for not complying with that contract.

> Consider that if they couldn’t protect their work, they never would have invested the money into making these and offering them for sale to begin with.

That's a massive assumption. Plenty of other plants are sold every single day that aren't patented. There's zero reason to assume that they couldn't make a very nice profit on these plants without a patent. Just like every single florist in the country does.

Those plants probably had nowhere near the R&D costs of the glowing petunias

I think they would lose nonethless, because they are specialized on genetic modification, and if there was no patent protection any experienced mass grower of petunias could undercut them by buying a single plant, cloning it, and growing it in large numbers.

Anyone selling petunias last year could have also undercut the next guy selling petunias because they were already selling basically identical products, no cloning step needed, but somehow multiple florists manage to exist and be profitable.

For this plant maybe, as they are pretty much a frivolity. Actual cash crops are another story.

Edit: it also seems that nontrivial engineering work was required to improve bioluminescence. It was not as simple as straightforwardly splicing in a few genes from a mushroom.

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