@nube pretty sure that posting only the name of your strain and some photos on disseminated forums is not enough protection to be honest…
The agencies delivering the patents don’t consult those forums (they don’t even know them). Once the patent is issued, you can fight it but at your expense. So proactivity is critical here. And proactivity means putting your strains in a database where patent agencies (USPTO in the US) consult prior to issuing a patent. When they notice your strain and its traits (phenotypes, chemotypes, etc.) is in the public domain, they decline the application and you don’t have to fight the overreaching patent.
Proactivity also means making any patenting attempt irrelevant in the cannabis cultivars world, and cutting the ground under the foot of the Monsantos etc. Cause once they have patented plants, they will lobby the different regulators to make your landrace and hybrids illegal for “safety reasons” (check what they’re doing in France and Pennsylvania for heirloom tomatoes and all crops…)
Few people really realize what it is about. Some people say, “they can’t take my seeds from my hands”. No, but they can make the use of your non-patented seeds illegal and force you to buy their seeds if you wanna stay out of trouble.
Farmers get sued all over France and other European countries for sharing and growing heirloom seeds that are not in the cultivar journal, maintained by the ministry of agriculture. That journal (or registry) of approved cultivars in almost exclusively composed of cultivars from Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta… and their subsidiaries. They managed to do that step-by-step, when farmers where saying “they can’t take my heirloom tomatoes away”. Thing is, once governments made the sale of heirloom tomatoes illegal for “sanitary” reasons, those farmers had no choice to grow the patented seeds.
We just don’t want that to happen again for cannabis cultivars.