The emergence and transformation of intellectual property in Greece has attracted little scholarly attention, and there is an understandable tendency in legal scholarship to focus exclusively on formal intellectual property rules. This article offers an original approach. First, it examines proprietary, attributional and other regulatory norms in plant breeding in Greece from the 1920s to the present day. Specifically, it traces how the management of knowledge, the distribution of credit, and the establishment of regimes dealing with ownership and productivity claims have evolved over that period. Until the early 1980s, there was no intellectual property ( IP) in the narrow (that is, purely doctrinal) sense, but this does not mean that IP sensu lato was entirely absent. State institutions managed credit through publications and catalogues, and in so doing, socially legitimised their role as the creators of new improved varieties, publicly made productivity claims for the new varieties, and at the same time regulated the practices of agronomists and farmers. This more expansive construction of " IP" provides a secondary claim to this article’s originality. The 1981 accession to the European Economic Community, however, reoriented Greek agriculture towards market liberalisation, alongside the institutionalisation of legal plant breeders’ rights, albeit not domestically, and national seed catalogues. As this article shows, though, this much more proprietarian and exclusionary trend is being challenged in Greece, as it is elsewhere in the world, by an emerging grassroots innovation movement.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)