...or at least to save the planet from wrongful intellectual property monopolies on its plants. Greenpeace recently emerged victorious in its opposition to a patent on the Indian Nap Hal wheat variety filed in the European Patent Office. The entity claiming inventorship of the wheat in question, esteemed for its superior baking qualities, was none other than Monsanto, arguably the Microsoft of the plant world for its propensity to file patents sun-up to sun-down. The problem in this case, the EPO concluded, was that Monsanto didn't invent the Nap Hal wheat at all. Rather, it was farmers in India who came up with the strain by breeding. Much as Monsanto might salivate at the prospect of collecting royalties from Indian farmers, you don't have to be concerned about sustainable agriculture in the developing world to agree the patent system was not designed to allow multinational corporations to reap what others have sowed.

The success of the Greenpeace challenge is but one example that the patent opposition procedure is alive and serving its intended purpose in the EPO. Not so much at our own PTO, but there are signs of life. As announced here at Boalt last spring, the Federal Trade Commission recently recommended an expanded opposition process in its proposal for patent reform. Not waiting for it to get easier, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched its own Patent Busting Project to challenge patents that betray the system's purpose and tread on the public domain. (EFF invites law students, patent attorneys, and prior art searchers to lend a hand to the Project.) Meanwhile, kudos to Greenpeace for keeping Nap Hal wheat free to use by the farmers who got down in the dirt to develop it.