A plant patent covers asexually reproducible plants (that is, through the use of grafts and cuttings), such as flowers. Sexually reproducible plants (that is, those that use pollination), can be monopolized under the Plant Protection Act. Both sexually and asexually reproducible plants can now also be monopolized by utility patent. Plant patents are comparatively recent innovations, the first one being granted in 1930. A plant patent is granted by the Government to an inventor (or the inventor's heirs or assigns) who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state. The grant, which lasts for 20 years from the date of filing the application, protects the inventor's right to exclude others from asexually reproducing, selling, or using the plant so reproduced. This protection is limited to a plant in its ordinary meaning: (1) A living plant organism which expresses a set of characteristics determined by its single, genetic makeup or genotype, which can be duplicated through asexual reproduction, but which can not otherwise be "made" or "manufactured." (2) Sports, mutants, hybrids, and transformed plants are comprehended; sports or mutants may be spontaneous or induced. Hybrids may be natural, from a planned breeding program, or somatic in source. While natural plant mutants might have naturally occurred, they must have been discovered in a cultivated area. (3) Algae and macro fungi are regarded as plants, but bacteria are not. A utility patent would be filed for claims to plants, seeds, genes, etc. According to the USPTO, there were 959 plant patent applications filed in 2009.

IP Street is driving the innovation economy by delivering actionable business intelligence from patent documents. IP Street empowers users to Discover, Measure, Compare, and Connect to business opportunities. Designed for inventors, IP counselors, strategists, executives, investors, and analysts, the features of IP Street's cutting edge technologies simplify the complexities of intellectual property into intuitive and meaningful graphical summaries. These visualizations provide the essential "due diligence" to allow users to effectively evaluate business questions. IP Street helps you better understand patent search, patent analytics, patent value, patent infringement and how to patent an idea. Our patent search services will provide patent analytics that will revolutionize your business strategy by helping you determine the value of a patent business intelligence from an IP lens. The company is headquartered in Spokane, Washington, with a development office in Seattle. More information is available at www.IPStreet.com.

Utility patents protect inventions that are a novel, nonobvious, and useful, such as: process innovations, machine innovations, manufacturing innovations, compositions of matter, or incremental improvements from foundational innovations. The three patentability requirements: New and Novel: For a United States patent the invention must never have been made public in any way, anywhere in the world, a year before the date on which an application for a patent is filed. In other countries, you have no one year grace period and require absolute novelty. Original and Nonobvious: An invention involves an inventive step if, when compared with what is already known, it would not be obvious to someone with a good knowledge and experience of the subject, for example, if you just make cosmetic changes that is obvious. Useful: This means that the invention must take the practical form of an apparatus or device, it has to do something.

Ask yourself? Which side of the game do you want to be on? Do you want to be remembered as the executive who failed to recognize the business opportunity staring you in the face? Or do you want to be remembered as the visionary who executed and altered your company forever? The choice is yours.