Please check out Atkins Library's digital exhibit on cannabis patents here. Despite marijuana being considered a Schedule I drug by the Federal Government of the United States, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued both plant and utility patents on cannabis. Learn more about these patents on this display.
As noted in to the United States Patent and Trademark Office's official publication, a plant patent is granted by the United States government to an inventor who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. The grant, which lasts for 20 years from the date of filing the application, protects the patent owner’s right to exclude others from asexually reproducing the plant, and from using, offering for sale, or selling the plant so reproduced, or any of its parts, throughout the United States, or from importing the plant so reproduced, or any part thereof, into the United States. This protection is limited to a plant in its ordinary meaning:
A living plant organism which expresses a set of characteristics determined by its single, genetic makeup or genotype, which can be duplicated through asexual reproduction, but cannot otherwise be "made" or "manufactured."
Cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, or transformed plants, where sports or mutants may be spontaneous or induced, and hybrids may be natural, from a planned breeding program, or somatic in source. While natural plant mutants might have naturally occurred, they must have been discovered in a cultivated area.
Algae and macro-fungi are regarded as plants, but bacteria are not.
For more information about plant patents, see the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. Atkins Library carries full color prints of plant patents on the third floor in the patent section. Plant patents may be searched on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website, and actual color photographs found in the files on the third floor. For help in searching, please contact Beth Scarborough.
