Charlotte’s Web was recently granted two utility patents covering different cannabis plants they’ve bred. The patents are structured similarly, outlining all the distinguishing characteristics, they’re designated ‘Kirsche’ and ‘Lindorea’. I’ll be going over the patent covering ‘Kirsche’, features of both plants are displayed in this patent as you’ll see.

Starting with the abstract:

“The present disclosure provides a new and distinct hemp cultivar designated ‘KIRSCHE’. The present disclosure related to seeds of the hemp plant ‘KIRSCHE’, to plants and parts of the hemp plant ‘KIRSCHE’, and to the methods for producing a hemp plant by crossing the hemp plant ‘KIRSCHE’ with itself or other Cannabis plants. The disclosure further relates to the morphological and physiological characteristics of the new and distinct hemp cultivar and its uses.”

As mentioned above, the patent doesn’t just cover the plant, it protects against people from breeding the plant with other cannabis plants to produce new varieties. One of the key differences between a utility patent like this one and plant breeder’s rights (plant variety protection) is the ability to breed with the plant. Plant breeder’s rights do not protect against people crossing your plant with a different variety to generate novel plants. The greater protections of utility patents come at a cost, both monetary and time. Plant breeder’s rights cost around $5,000 USD as a one-time payment. While utility patents cost around the same to file, they have costs to maintain the patent and higher attorney fees due to the length of time from initiation to granting.

Looking at some of the defined characteristics we can evaluate what kind of plants they’ve patented:

Table 1 shows some of the physical characteristics of the plants and goes over the disease and pest resistances they’ve evaluated. Disease and pest resistance are very important traits in crops, any trait that mitigates the risk of crop loss are highly valued. They include many more tables that cover the differences in leaf arrangement, leaf shape, leaf structure, petiole structure, petiole color and many more to create a highly defined structure of what these plants will look like at maturity. 

As you can see in Table 5 the cannabinoids are quantified and aroma defined for the plants as well. Terpene content is quantified in Table 7, but many volatile compounds are responsible for the aroma apart from terpenes. Thus they provide a qualitative assessment of what the plant is supposed to smell like. Personally, I think it would be very interesting to hear a court case where a plant is being contested over something like aroma. How do you define a ‘sweet, musky floral scent with hints of cedar, sage and eucalyptus’ in court? It could be one of those ‘you know it when you smell it’ cases. 

The CBD content of both plants is between 7-10% with THC ranging from 0.2-0.27%. These plants are getting close to the THC limit of 0.3% if tested by dry weight. It’s possible these plants could go over that limit under certain environmental conditions. 

In summary, these two plants are so tightly defined it’s very unlikely anyone could accidentally infringe on the patents by growing plants not directly related to these. The most interesting traits in these plants are their disease and pest resistances, especially the ‘Lindorea’ variety. 

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 Charlotte’s Web.