Limites do Direito de Propriedade Industrial de Plantas

In this dissertation the limits of the industrial, intellectual property rights as applied to plants are analyzed. The limits of the legal rights are unfold by the analysis of the theory of industrial property, the related, the theory of the social function of the property, international treaties, and by present laws, and available data bank on industrial property in the United States of America, European Union, and Brazil. The aim of this work is to point out how Brazilian laws and jurisprudence deal with the limits of the intellectual property rights of plants in the two used protection systems, the variety protection and the patent ones. To embody this study with a field work we proceeded a search on how people of the grape and wine industry of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil perceive the existence and the enforcement of this kind of right protection, and its limits when applied to vines. The method of analysis used in this study is the deductive one, its application by the way of a study case using the mesoanalysis of the organizational field theory. The principal points of the results of this study are: 1) the limits of the intellectual, industrial property rights are related to time, territory, legal and mandatory matters, and to exhaustion of rights; 2) there are indeed an incipient Brazilian jurisprudence, which deals with the subject in a non-uniform way; 3) representatives from the grape and wine industry of the State of Rio Grande do Sul do recognize the existence of the intellectual, industrial property rights applied to vines in Brazil, and understand them as an important form of property protection for the country. The lack of knowledge, and the eventual disregard for this kind of legal protection, and the lack of the corresponding law enforcement as well, might become significant sources of difficulties for fully implementing the intellectual, industrial property rights in the country. As a rule, people involved in the grape and wine business know very little about the limits of these legal rights, but do recognize a positive relationship between the intellectual, industrial property rights and the process of technology innovation, and hope that these rights will soon be widely enforced in Brazil. As a conclusion, a framework is proposed for application of the intellectual, industrial property rights related to protected plants, aiming orienting the recognition of the rights of the inventor, and of the users of these plants, and the corresponding limits of the rights called upon.