Grow them from cuttings if you like, but keep the plants away from wifi or they’ll report you.
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Have heard good things over the show but i haven’t seen it 
Some day i hope, i’m just lousy at picking up new shows to watch.
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This reminds me of the old video cassette days, where the “FBI” attempted to scare you into submission. Total number of people I know of from back then that were subjected to “severe civil and criminal penalties”: zero.
It’s a slippery slope from there.
Contracts of adhesion:
“Everyone has equal leverage because everyone can choose not to participate”
My generous ass.
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Which, just as a sidenote, is why it is wickedly complicated to manage potentially invasive non-autochtonous species. And why Access and Benefit Sharing policies are not at all working. And why CITES is a toothless tiger when it comes to plants.
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As long as we agree that corporate persons are male for the purposes of intrusive and self-interested control over the reproduction of their chattels I suspect they’ll find a reason not to be concerned.
If they are female abstractions, though, like boats or assorted classical virtues, that might be a tricky one.
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I feel a short story coming on. We suddenly find out that some intergalactic entity owns the rights to how human beings are allowed to propagate, and comes down to sort us out before it’s investment is ruined. It becomes known in legend as “the weeding times.”
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The Intergalactic Parent Company gives humanity a 100 year deadline to come up with a propagation method that does not infringe upon its many patents (including cloning), or else. Have it be written as a dark comedy and i’m game for this.
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“Dark comedy” is pretty much all I do. I’ll toss it in the story bank and see if it finds some legs.
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FWIW, most dog breeders can and do make you sign a contract agreeing to neuter the puppy you buy from them. OTOH so far as I know they don’t – yet – ban cloning Fido.
Plant patents have been around for 90 years, as others have noted. Harldy a sign of late-stage capitalism. More likely an early-stage awareness of how the world has been working for some time now.
If someone spend the substantial sums required to develop a distinctive clone, they get to protect it so that others can’t sell it. That’s good for innovation. A lot of plant patents are held by individual breeders, non-profits and academic institutions, and the protection and royalty income is essential for them to innovate (and eat).
Realistically, the chances of being sued for growing your own cuttings for personal use is vanishingly small, much like making a personal copy of a DVD. You’re not going to be in danger unless you’re selling the propagated plants, widely distributing them for free, or using the propagated plants in the context of a commercial or otherwise substantially public endeavor, e.g.: a gardening show; an estate where the plants and garden are a big part of the image of the site and which is used for shows or rented for weddings and such; etc. People get patents for the purposes of making money, and there is absolutely no money to be made in suing private individuals for propagating plants in their own houses for their own use. Unlike trademarks, they don’t have to protect it or lose it – the patent is theirs for the term, as long as they keep making the appropriate payments, and they have absolute discretion to pursue an action or not against any given infringing party.
I am not a lawyer, but I do work in intellectual property. The idea that companies are spending thousands of dollars in order to sue you for making a cutting of a $10 plant is ridiculous.
I’m not a lawyer, but the idea that a company can sue me as a private individual for making a cutting of a plant is stupid, and needs to be fixed in the law. At least in copyright there’s fair use. Just because it’s not profitable so companies don’t sue individuals doesn’t make their right to do it a moral good.
It’s as ridiculous as prohibiting me from doing work on my own vehicle, or being capable of suing me for making a recipe to copy a restaurant item.
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My short story involves a forsythia shrub on trial.
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I have never watched a Blue Ray (I went straight from DVD to torrenting to streaming (and occasional torrenting)). It’s still funny to me that the worst experience - unskippable legal warnings and shoddy menus - is still only reserved for paying customers.
I started doing Blu-Ray™®© since they have them for free at the Library. In addition to the by-design horribly user-experience, they are always scratched and either get stuck or skip chunks of the film. It’s amazing how much better streaming is.
