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Seeds and Contracts

AJ Drew

AJ Drew

Received email asking if a person has to agree to a contract to buy seeds from PBM.  I said no and asked why.  They replied with a quote reportedly from the Puckerbutt web site: 

"I agree with the Terms and Conditions. Seeds purchased through PBPC, LLC, or its affiliates, along with plants and peppers grown therefrom, shall be used for personal and non-commercial purposes only. Any reproduction or redistribution of seeds or plants therefrom, or commercial use of peppers grown from these seeds, or derivatives thereof, is prohibited without the express written consent of PBPC, LLC, or its affiliates. In so purchasing seeds through PBPC, LLC, or its affiliates, you expressly agree to these terms and conditions of sale."
 
Not complaining.  It is there business and I can certainly understand wanting to protect your creation.  So I guess a contract that says you can not resell the seed stock seems to make sense.  But restricting the commercial use of what you grow seems counter productive to seed sales.
 
Wouldn't you sell more seeds if they could be used to produce a commercial crop but not for seed saving and reselling?  I think when Red Sav was covered by Plant Variety Protection Act, the creator sold seeds, farmers grew commercial crops, but they bought their seed from the creator of the thing.  Same as Monsanto contract.  You buy their seed, grow your commercial crop, but dont dare save those seeds because it violates the contract.

The other thing that comes to mind is that within a season, the genie is out the bottle.  People will be selling the pods and seeds on Ebay or what not.  Not saying it is right, but it is sure to happen.

Again, not complaining.  Just looking for opinions on the business model.  Seems kind of flawed to me.
 
 
 
Deeply wrong in my not-so-humble opinion.

If you're TMing mother nature, I don't like your practice.

I TM you, you may not reproduce...
Actually, it's growing on me.
 
RaelThomas said:
If you're TMing mother nature, I don't like your practice.
 
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You view seems to be wide spread in the distaste for the Monsanto contracts.  The view also seems present in the Plant Variety Protection Act.  If I understand the current law, PVPA allows growers to seed save for their own crops.  Might be why Monsanto created their contracts.

I really do understand the desire to protect years of work.  Just seems like a counter productive method.
 
I don't think they would be able to do anything about someone violating the agreement anyway - since they did not initially post the restriction before beginning sales of the seeds for the "Carolina Reaper" and as such would be hard to prove where exactly the original seeds came from and if they were covered by the restriction or not (IIRC they posted that a few months after beginning sales of the seeds/peppers in order to try and keep people from growing the peppers and using them to resell seeds\sauces etc. made from the plants to try and keep sole ownership of Reaper products or to attempt to make resellers of reaper based seeds/sauces pay them a percentage of the sales !)
 
But they did not post the agreement until they had already distributed some seeds/pods so would be pretty much impossible to enforce since they could not prove whether the agreement was in place when the original seeds were obtained - sure they could force a person to spend $ to fight it but doubt they would be successful in enforcing that type of contract anyway and they'd likely go broke trying to enforce it.
 
JDFan, I had not thought about licensing / getting a percentage of commercial efforts like hot sauces or selling your peppers.  Ye, I can see the business sense in that.  I was just thinking of it like preventing commercial sales, but add that percentage in and it makes sense.
 
AJ Drew said:
JDFan, I had not thought about licensing / getting a percentage of commercial efforts like hot sauces or selling your peppers.  Ye, I can see the business sense in that.  I was just thinking of it like preventing commercial sales, but add that percentage in and it makes sense.
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I think that was most of the reasoning behind it -- they figured if they could get a percentage of anything sold with the "Carolina Reaper" label by intimidating people into licensing the product with them and giving a percentage and hype it as the "World's Hottest Pepper" they could make a quick buck. Not sure how all of that worked out as now there are so many places selling "Reaper"  products ( since they only trademarked "SMOKIN ED'S CAROLINA REAPER" and not "Carolina Reaper" or "Reaper")  that are not affiliated or giving a percentage that I doubt they ever really saw any real amount of return on the effort and it probably burned a lot of bridges along the way for future efforts (as I doubt anyone they tried to force to pay part of their sales after growing them will be very likely to work with them in the future - esp since they decided to try that after already hyping the pepper and sending them to growers to peak interest without mentioning any of that ! )
 
JDFan, am thinking it must have done something good because they continue to do it & they just released Chocolate Bhutlah SM.  I would compare it to the Monsanto contract, but Monsanto wants you to sell what you grow.  Selling seed is how Monsanto makes a lot of its money.  I guess different market and different strategy.

Probably why I doubt I will ever make serious money.  I would think it just too cool to invent a pepper and have a bunch of people putting my name on hot sauce bottles.  No head for these things.
 
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