Appeal against large brewer's patent on barley dismissed
Environmentalists have failed with an appeal against a malting barley patent of the Carlsberg and Heineken groups before the European Patent Office.
Photo by Isak Engström on Unsplash
The Board of Appeal refused to cancel the patent, the initiative "No Patents on Seeds" announced on Tuesday after the hearing in Munich.
The seed protectors conceded a setback. "So there will be more patents on barley and beer in the future," spokesman Christoph Then said. The initiative had linked the malting barley dispute to an appeal to the European Patent Office to generally no longer place traditionally bred plants under patent protection.
German and also Austrian brewers support the demands concerning barley, the basic ingredient for brewing malt. Initially, there was no confirmation from the European Patent Office. Carlsberg had already not responded to inquiries the day before.
The initiative accused the board of appeal of thus not having clarified the fundamental questions of the patentability of plants from conventional breeding. "Such patents affect diversity in the field, progress in breeding and the interests of consumers," Then said.
At issue at the trial was European patent EP2373154, filed by Carlsberg and Heineken in 2009 for "beverages made from barley and malt with low dimethyl sulfide content." Barley is the basic ingredient of malt. According to the literature, a high dimethyl sulphide content means that the malt tends to have an undesirable herbaceous taste.
However, the initiative is by no means only concerned with beer. Plant breeders fear that such patents could hinder their work. The usual form of plant variety protection is less extensive. This roughly means that the owner of a protected variety may plant and sell it on his own, but others are allowed scientific experiments and non-commercial cultivation.
"No Patents on Seeds" cited decisions by the European Commission and European Patent Organisation in 2016 and 2017 not to issue patents on traditional breeding techniques - but this does not apply retroactively.
Apart from that, the initiative fears that the regulation will not be implemented consistently anyway, as Carlsberg has filed further patent applications in the meantime.
As for malting barley, it's not just seed protectors who are concerned. "We don't need these patents that are being lived in America," Walter König, the managing director of the Bavarian Brewers Association, told Bayerischer Rundfunk. "Because we're afraid that this rat race that's going on behind there in terms of licensing rights and royalty payments will end up having the effect that malting barley will be much more expensive and perhaps no longer available or affordable for medium-sized and small breweries."/cho/DP/fba (dpa)
Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.
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