The GCP is collaboration among researchers and breeders,of different disciplines and from a wide variety of institutions, serving an equally broad group of potential users. Much of the success of the program depends upon a clear Freedom to Operate (FtO) on the materials, tools and methods. Scientists commonly are not sufficiently concerned with the legal implications of the use in their research of materials and tools that are developed by others. This is particularly true for scientists in institutions that primarily produce public goods.

Genetic resources used to be considered part of the ‘heritage of mankind’ and intellectual property used to be confined to industrial products and processes and to OECD-countries. In 1992, however, the Convention on Biological Diversity introduced the application of principle of national sovereignty to genetic resources. In the following year, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the World Trade Organisation (TRIPS) was the start of the introduction or expansion/strengthening of intellectual property rights systems in developing countries. This impacts the freedom to operate on technologies and in some cases materials, particularly in biotechnological research and development, and may offer new opportunities for the transfer of technologies.

Increasing amounts of information are becoming available on aspects of IPR and PGR issues. The issues are complex and the positions of the different stakeholders in the conservation and use of PGR sometimes conflict. .

The fact that members of the GCP need to develop products for the poor carries the challenge that all the building blocks of their plant research may fall within the scope of international and national IPR and PGR regulations including create sovereign rights or ownership over genetic resources, products and processes.

Roughly speaking, there are three different arena’s in which IPR and PGR regulation is being developed:

1. The Convention on Biological Diversity assigns national sovereignty over biodiversity. and signatories to the Convention can make access to their resources subject to conditions.
2. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture creates a facilitated access regime through its multilateral system for most (but not all) crops relevant to the GCP.
3. The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the World Trade Organisation increased the spread of private rights (IPRs) over products and processes used in genomic research.
4. A fourth forum is the Intergovernmental Committee on genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore of the World Intellectual property Organisation (which has not come to a conclusion yet).

Even though these regulatory systems are primarily geared to the commercial exploitation of genetic resources and protected inventions, they do have a marked impact on all research and development. Scientists are commonly insufficiently aware of the implications of these relatively recent developments for their work. The course introduces scientists of GCP consortium members, partners, and stakeholders on topics concerned with access& benefit sharing and intellectual property matters at a rather basic level, but in such detail that they are well prepared to understand the impact of the relevant rights systems on their projects and on the implications of the use of materials and research tools for the availability of the output of their work for the target intermediate and end-users. The course will include a test to verify that the course participants have sufficiently understood the issues. It may include a possibility to follow the course at two levels.

1. The first objective of this course is to provide a basic and practical distance-learning module to help GCP scientists to understand the importance of limitations to the rights to use plant genetic resources and tools, methods and products protected by intellectual property rights.
2. Secondly, the course will enhance basic knowledge of these agreements in relation to different types of GCP-scientific areas.
3. The third objective of the course is to create awareness of the existence of limitations to Freedom to Operate based on international policies and national regulations, especially given that the products of their research have to be freely available to resource-poor farmers.

A follow-up course will be developed to give participants the skills to search for prior art etc.

This knowledge will be the basis of skills that will allow the participants:

• to better communicate with specialists in this field: lawyers in their institution and technology transfer specialists
• to include the regulatory issues in technology transfer plans
• to analyse the possible ownership issues in their own research using existing tools and to explore possible alternatives.
• to better assess options for Freedom to Operate.

The nucleus of the course is to allow participants to understand the use and reach of existing treaties and conventions as well as national regulation in the context of the fast-moving fields of new technologies they apply, notably comparative genomics, molecular breeding, and bioinformatics, in addition to those related to germplasm.

The course will not focus on the political debate circumventing each regulatory issue per se but explicitly assess the practical implications of different forms of regulation on the day-to-day reality of individual researchers in the plant improvement and genetic resources communities.