Intellectual Property Rights: Need for Overhaul.

The article discusses the intellectual property rights (IPR) in relation to cotton varieties. These are legal rights granted by governments to protect certain products of human intellectual effort and ingenuity. Inventors of biotechnology cotton varieties have to apply to governments individually for protection and permission to commercialize the same variety or one with a gene that has been in exploitation in some other country for more than ten years. There are some mandatory criteria that must be met for a new plant variety to be patented, including uniformity. Most countries have some form of law concerning plant variety protection (PVP), while countries that do not have, are devising at least some form of PVP for use as an alternative to IPR.