Copyright

I'm very pleased because my first iris of the year has bloomed; it's Blatant, one of the ones I purchased last year.  Lullaby of Spring and Baltic Star are also getting revved up for blooming, as is Samurai Warrior (one of the ones Meg Baker sent me) and the Night Edition/Radiant Apogee pot¹.

This thought of pretty flowers has led me to thinking about copyright infringement.  I'm weird that way.

See, one of the things about named iris varities is that, once they're registered with the body that does the registering, no one else can use that name except under a rather elaborate series of restrictions².  But no one is stopping me from digging up my extra Blatants and Superstitions and Edith Wolfords and Butter Pecans at the end of the summer and giving them to my friends, and further no one would stop me if I started selling them to my friends, or for that matter to strangers.  Granted it would take me a while to build up enough stock for it to be worth my while to go into business, once I did I'd be a nursery all of my own; I'd have no royalties to pay to the folks I bought my original rhizomes from, nor to the breeders who developed the varieties to begin with.

This makes me think about stuff like hybrid wheat, which has been specifically bred so that the seed you get at the end of the season is infertile.  A farmer can't save some of her crop grown with this stuff and use it to plant the next one; instead she has to buy all new seed the next year.  I'm not seeing a lot of difference here, except in scale.  Food crops are a huge business, possibly the largest in the world, and in comparison the trade in irises (which are almost purely decorative, though you can make perfume from the rhizomes) is basically a flyspeck.  Or perhaps it's that you just can't police whether every single gardener is destroying his extra Mother Earths instead of giving them away...

Thoughts? 

1: I don't know which it is because the ink I labeled those pots with ran in the rain and washed the names off.  Then one of the two died of too much moisture over the winter.  I'm rather hoping it's Radiant Apogee that survived. 

2: There are conditions under which a name may be reused, but it requires the written consent of the original user (no mention of the original user's estate, so that could be tricky if the person's dead), and the original variety has to have never been introduced ("registered" means "the name is in our database"; "introduced" means "someone sold this variety under this name") and it may not appear in any breeding records for any other registered varieties.  So if the variety is the great-great-great-great grandparent of even one currently registered variety, or if it was sold for one season in a short-lived catalog 57 years ago and only two people bought it, too bad--you're out of luck.  Even if the last known rhizome of the original Sweet Charity (I have no idea if there's an actual variety that uses this name, I just made it up) died in 1922, if it's in any current variety's breeding records you can't use the name.

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