Tim Blake, founder of the the Emerald Cup cannabis competion, smells a sample of his Berry White strain of marijuana in a drying room at his farm.
Tim Blake has grown marijuana for 41 years in Northern California, becoming a major figure in the industry as a grower, activist and founder of the 12-year-old Emerald Cup cannabis competition.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business...comes-a-6631240.php?google_editors_picks=true
But no matter how popular the winning strains of marijuana are at next month’s Emerald Cup or at his Mendocino farm, there is little that can be done to secure their value as intellectual property. And that’s a major challenge for the booming, multibillion-dollar weed business.
CANNABIS BUSINESS
(l-r) Monica Lo and Tiffany Wu smoke a joint before work at Peace Plaza in Japantown in San Francisco, California on Friday, November 6, 2015. They are childhood friends and roommates that are working to lessen the stigma of cannabis in the Asian community. Group helps pot smokers come out to Asian American parents Buddie, the mascot for the pro-marijuana legalization group ResponsibleOhio, holds a sign during a promotional tour stop at Miami University, Friday, Oct. 23, 2015, in Oxford, Ohio. A ballot proposal before Ohio voters this fall would be the first in the Midwest to take marijuana use and sales from illegal to legal for both personal and medical use in a single vote. 5 things on legalizing marijuana California can learn from Ohio Next big corporate step for cannabis biz: Weed commodity trading
While a Silicon Valley company can legally protect its most valuable technology with federal patents, cannabis companies cannot secure their core products as long as the federal government continues to classify marijuana as an illegal drug on par with heroin — one with “no accepted medical use.”
It makes their valuable product vulnerable.
“It’s a real gray area when it comes to getting these rights,” Blake, 58, said. “And we’re all trying to figure it out together.”
Four states allow the adult recreational use of cannabis and 23 others and the District of Columbia permit its medicinal use. With California voters likely to see legalization on the ballot in 2016, there are fears among the state’s estimated 50,000 cannabis farmers that Big Pharma and Big Ag will swoop in.
Already, a new wave of investors is amassing in California. Regulations signed last month by Gov. Jerry Brown allow medical cannabis companies, which previously operated as nonprofits, to take on investors for the first time. Deep-pocketed venture capitalists and tech angels who wouldn’t have dreamed about putting money in cannabis are now looking at Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties, where roughly 60 percent of the nation’s weed is grown.
Investors, particularly those coming from the tech world, “are attuned to coming into a company and trying to secure as much intellectual property as they can quickly,” said Timothy Yim, the Startup Policy Lab’s director of data and privacy, who counsels cannabis-related startups.
“They want to make sure that you have as much of your intellectual property secured as possible” before the invest, said Kyndra Miller, an attorney whose San FranciscoCannabusiness Law practice specializes in weed clients, including Blake.
But concepts like intellectual property haven’t been top of mind for pot growers who have operated underground for the last half-century, stashing their cash in tree stumps in Humboldt forests and dealing in a cash-only world. That is changing.
“A year and a half ago, we started telling people to think about (intellectual property) because this is what’s coming down the line,” said Reggie Gaudino, vice president for scientific operations and director of intellectual property at Steep Hill Labs, a Berkeley cannabis analytics lab with operations in several states. “Only in the last few months have people started to listen to what we had to say.”
Drying marijuana at Tim Blake's farm in Laytonville. Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle
Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle
IMAGE 1 OF 3 Drying marijuana at Tim Blake's farm in Laytonville.
There has been a 50 percent increase in the amount of cannabis-related trademark applications to the California Secretary of State’s office since January, though the total is just slightly more than 100, department officials said. Weed-related patents of all sorts are flooding federal trademark and patent offices, according to industry insiders.
“The reality is that most mature businesses have established the importance of intellectual property,” said Gaudino. “But one of the first things I noticed (in the cannabis industry) is that none of growers and breeders wanted to discuss that. They’d say, ‘No, we’re all open source,’ and the whole cannabis kumbaya stuff. And I’d say, ‘Let me know how that works out for you, because once this is legal, Big Pharma and Big Ag are going to come in here and grab whatever they can.’”
Few industry standards exist in a business that has been a Wild West environment for so long. There are hundreds of strains of cannabis on the legal market, many with interchangeable names. Said one cannabis industry veteran: “If one isn’t selling one week, they’ll just change its name and put the same one out there the next week.”
Tim Blake, founder and producer of the The Emerald Cup, holds three different varieties of marijuana at his farm in Laytonville California, Friday, November 13, 2015. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Tim Blake, founder and producer of the The Emerald Cup, holds three different varieties of marijuana at his farm in Laytonville California, Friday, November 13, 2015. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle
To try to bring some order to the industry through science, Steep Hill analysts are using leading-edge technology, like a $1 million DNA sequencer, to “try to establish the genetic map of cannabis” as Gaudino puts it.
He said all of the marijuana strains found on dispensary shelves are blends “from the hand of man,” and he believes that they will be able to be patented once they are definitively mapped. In the last 1½ years, Steep Hill scientists have accumulated 1,000 samples of weed, sifting through some 400 strains that are on the market. Many of them, Gaudino said, share numerous similarities.
But drawing the genetic weed map will take time. In the meantime, others are trying other ways to plant their intellectual property flag in the weed business.
Blake is in the process of securing trademarks for his Emerald Cup logo, which he said people have tried to use to promote other marijuana contests. In an attempt to safeguard his spot in the ever-changing marijuana sector, he is seeking to secure the Emerald name to put on other cannabis-related businesses such as Emerald Edibles and Emerald Genetics.
Tim Blake, founder and producer of the the Emerald Cup cannabis competition, is looking to protect his pot strains. Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Tim Blake, founder and producer of the the Emerald Cup cannabis competition, is looking to protect his pot strains.
Other cannabis-related organizations are securing trademark protection for their company names, T-shirt designs, caps — anything not tied to the illegal cannabis flower, said Shabnam Malek, a longtime intellectual property attorney and the executive director of the recently founded National Cannabis Bar Association.
Some are trying to patent other non-plant aspects of the business, like the technology used to extract the active ingredients in cannabis.
Oakland cannabis-infused edible maker Auntie Dolores obtained trademark status for its name as a baked goods product, but not for its marijuana-related formula. Its former president, Lauren Fraser, who now consults other businesses, hopes that more pot industry veterans come out of the shadows and try to protect their work.
“People are afraid that Monsanto or someone will get ahold of all these genetics, pick out one aspect of it, then make their own version cheaper,” Fraser said. But for now, she said, “the hardest part is protecting the strain.”
Tim Blake has grown marijuana for 41 years in Northern California, becoming a major figure in the industry as a grower, activist and founder of the 12-year-old Emerald Cup cannabis competition.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business...comes-a-6631240.php?google_editors_picks=true
But no matter how popular the winning strains of marijuana are at next month’s Emerald Cup or at his Mendocino farm, there is little that can be done to secure their value as intellectual property. And that’s a major challenge for the booming, multibillion-dollar weed business.
CANNABIS BUSINESS
(l-r) Monica Lo and Tiffany Wu smoke a joint before work at Peace Plaza in Japantown in San Francisco, California on Friday, November 6, 2015. They are childhood friends and roommates that are working to lessen the stigma of cannabis in the Asian community. Group helps pot smokers come out to Asian American parents Buddie, the mascot for the pro-marijuana legalization group ResponsibleOhio, holds a sign during a promotional tour stop at Miami University, Friday, Oct. 23, 2015, in Oxford, Ohio. A ballot proposal before Ohio voters this fall would be the first in the Midwest to take marijuana use and sales from illegal to legal for both personal and medical use in a single vote. 5 things on legalizing marijuana California can learn from Ohio Next big corporate step for cannabis biz: Weed commodity trading
While a Silicon Valley company can legally protect its most valuable technology with federal patents, cannabis companies cannot secure their core products as long as the federal government continues to classify marijuana as an illegal drug on par with heroin — one with “no accepted medical use.”
It makes their valuable product vulnerable.
“It’s a real gray area when it comes to getting these rights,” Blake, 58, said. “And we’re all trying to figure it out together.”
Four states allow the adult recreational use of cannabis and 23 others and the District of Columbia permit its medicinal use. With California voters likely to see legalization on the ballot in 2016, there are fears among the state’s estimated 50,000 cannabis farmers that Big Pharma and Big Ag will swoop in.
Already, a new wave of investors is amassing in California. Regulations signed last month by Gov. Jerry Brown allow medical cannabis companies, which previously operated as nonprofits, to take on investors for the first time. Deep-pocketed venture capitalists and tech angels who wouldn’t have dreamed about putting money in cannabis are now looking at Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity counties, where roughly 60 percent of the nation’s weed is grown.
Investors, particularly those coming from the tech world, “are attuned to coming into a company and trying to secure as much intellectual property as they can quickly,” said Timothy Yim, the Startup Policy Lab’s director of data and privacy, who counsels cannabis-related startups.
“They want to make sure that you have as much of your intellectual property secured as possible” before the invest, said Kyndra Miller, an attorney whose San FranciscoCannabusiness Law practice specializes in weed clients, including Blake.
But concepts like intellectual property haven’t been top of mind for pot growers who have operated underground for the last half-century, stashing their cash in tree stumps in Humboldt forests and dealing in a cash-only world. That is changing.
“A year and a half ago, we started telling people to think about (intellectual property) because this is what’s coming down the line,” said Reggie Gaudino, vice president for scientific operations and director of intellectual property at Steep Hill Labs, a Berkeley cannabis analytics lab with operations in several states. “Only in the last few months have people started to listen to what we had to say.”
Drying marijuana at Tim Blake's farm in Laytonville. Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle
Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle
IMAGE 1 OF 3 Drying marijuana at Tim Blake's farm in Laytonville.
There has been a 50 percent increase in the amount of cannabis-related trademark applications to the California Secretary of State’s office since January, though the total is just slightly more than 100, department officials said. Weed-related patents of all sorts are flooding federal trademark and patent offices, according to industry insiders.
“The reality is that most mature businesses have established the importance of intellectual property,” said Gaudino. “But one of the first things I noticed (in the cannabis industry) is that none of growers and breeders wanted to discuss that. They’d say, ‘No, we’re all open source,’ and the whole cannabis kumbaya stuff. And I’d say, ‘Let me know how that works out for you, because once this is legal, Big Pharma and Big Ag are going to come in here and grab whatever they can.’”
Few industry standards exist in a business that has been a Wild West environment for so long. There are hundreds of strains of cannabis on the legal market, many with interchangeable names. Said one cannabis industry veteran: “If one isn’t selling one week, they’ll just change its name and put the same one out there the next week.”
Tim Blake, founder and producer of the The Emerald Cup, holds three different varieties of marijuana at his farm in Laytonville California, Friday, November 13, 2015. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Tim Blake, founder and producer of the The Emerald Cup, holds three different varieties of marijuana at his farm in Laytonville California, Friday, November 13, 2015. Ramin Rahimian/Special to The Chronicle
To try to bring some order to the industry through science, Steep Hill analysts are using leading-edge technology, like a $1 million DNA sequencer, to “try to establish the genetic map of cannabis” as Gaudino puts it.
He said all of the marijuana strains found on dispensary shelves are blends “from the hand of man,” and he believes that they will be able to be patented once they are definitively mapped. In the last 1½ years, Steep Hill scientists have accumulated 1,000 samples of weed, sifting through some 400 strains that are on the market. Many of them, Gaudino said, share numerous similarities.
But drawing the genetic weed map will take time. In the meantime, others are trying other ways to plant their intellectual property flag in the weed business.
Blake is in the process of securing trademarks for his Emerald Cup logo, which he said people have tried to use to promote other marijuana contests. In an attempt to safeguard his spot in the ever-changing marijuana sector, he is seeking to secure the Emerald name to put on other cannabis-related businesses such as Emerald Edibles and Emerald Genetics.
Tim Blake, founder and producer of the the Emerald Cup cannabis competition, is looking to protect his pot strains. Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Ramin Rahimian, Special To The Chronicle Tim Blake, founder and producer of the the Emerald Cup cannabis competition, is looking to protect his pot strains.
Other cannabis-related organizations are securing trademark protection for their company names, T-shirt designs, caps — anything not tied to the illegal cannabis flower, said Shabnam Malek, a longtime intellectual property attorney and the executive director of the recently founded National Cannabis Bar Association.
Some are trying to patent other non-plant aspects of the business, like the technology used to extract the active ingredients in cannabis.
Oakland cannabis-infused edible maker Auntie Dolores obtained trademark status for its name as a baked goods product, but not for its marijuana-related formula. Its former president, Lauren Fraser, who now consults other businesses, hopes that more pot industry veterans come out of the shadows and try to protect their work.
“People are afraid that Monsanto or someone will get ahold of all these genetics, pick out one aspect of it, then make their own version cheaper,” Fraser said. But for now, she said, “the hardest part is protecting the strain.”
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