P2P gardening community site swapping seeds: copyright theft?
MyFolia.com, an innovative new online gardening community and organiser that lets you list the plants you want to grow and matches you to gardeners who want to swap seeds. As you’d expect, MyFolia.com is packed with tools to allow gardeners to swap ideas and tips as well, but it’s the seed swapping that drew the attention of a commenter at Lifehacker and has cast a dark cloud over conversations in the groups area of MyFolia:
The seed stash lets you list your cuttings and seeds. Seed saving is a huge movement in the UK and parts of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a grassroots effort on behalf of our vanishing biodiversity and a protest against corporate control of local and global food supplies.
Unfortunately, even without genetically modified plants in the picture, now hybrid plants often also have copyright protections on them.
Canadian Gardening Magazine called it the “Facebook for Gardeners” but the copyright debate makes it sound more like illegal file-sharing. Is this a job for the Creative Commons’ Biological Materials Transfer Project (Science Commons) or is this the start of seed piracy?