In Aurora Cannabis’s latest conference call their CEO Miguel Martin made some comments on protecting their IP I’d like to address. The transcript:

“There is a misconception amongst growers and LPs, both domestically and internationally, that you cannot protect or own the genetics around a particular cultivar. That’s completely untrue. We are licensing unique genetic markers of these cultivars that we develop and we are able to identify those that are infringing upon that and clearly the law is very clear on this issue and we’ll have a very strong case. You’ll start to see litigation around that as well as those that we believe have infringed on some of our bio-synthetic assets, and that’s also an additional revenue stream for the company.”

Frequent readers of my content know infringement on their biosynthetic assets isn’t new, I’ve gone over it at length. Infringement of these patents is so blatant they’re basically standing in a spotlight doing the jig in a dark room. The new part is the infringement on plant assets Aurora owns the rights to. They’re claiming someone is infringing on the Plant Breeders Rights (PBR). I had a conversation about this with Ryan Lee, a cannabis breeding veteran, with the important part on how it could happen and be tested for below:

Essentially, what Miguel’s saying is only meaningful if they’ve tested dried cannabis flower that was sold commercially by a large licensed producer. A micro wouldn’t be worth the cost to sue, because they couldn’t get enough out of litigation to justify the expense. It couldn’t be considered a “revenue stream” unless they bullied the micro into paying a fee for use.

As the cannabis industry matures I expect to see more litigation. We’ve already seen Canopy vs GW Pharma, Aurora vs Willow and Lavvan vs Amyris. I’ll be here covering all the action as it happens.

The preceding is the opinion of the author, and is in no way intended to be a recommendation to buy or sell any security or derivative. The author holds no position in any company mentioned.