How do patent owners track the plants

I’ve been pondering this for a hot minute

Patent owners keep people from reproducing and selling their plants, and I heard that even if you reproduce the patented plant a day before the patent ends you still owe royalties

How do they enforce that, and how do they know if it was grafted by you and not bought? Like, couldn’t any home grower just graft the tree and keep quiet about having extras until after the patent ends? (Without selling any, just grafting for home use)

Just recently learned about patents and stuff so I’ve been checking if what I own is protected or not xD

They mostly enforce it against people selling trees or scions, I doubt there’s much enforcement against someone doing it for themselves non-commercially. Still technically an infringement, but unless you talk about it on a public forum or something there’s no enforcement mechanism.

I’m sure some day there will be “smart trees” that alert patent owners when scions are grafted, but we’re not in that dystopian future yet.

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Don’t be too sure such tech isn’t here…
Bayer/Monsanto have brought suit against many people for saving seed
that carried genes of the “Roundup Ready” corn and soybeans!
How’d they know?

Its actually funny how they know…their high paid lawyers get US courts to approve them taking samples and testing for the “Round Up Ready” genes. Even if you didn’t plant their soybeans, but there is cross pollination with another farmer’s crop that is “Round Up Ready”, they have you on patent infringement. There is a whole documentary on it. They started out going after the mid west guys with the seed cleaners, and got their list of customers and went after each and every one of them.
Monsanto/Bayer have billions of dollars to fight litigation, and they run the little farmers out of business on threats of lawsuits.

Right now I wouldn’t be overly concerned about patent infringement, but if Monsanto/Bayer every buys out Zaiger’s…watch out!!!

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