E-commerce is the new front line for variety IP
Trade has moved online, and so has infringement. By the time an unauthorised listing reaches you secondhand, it has usually been selling for a while.
If you only find online infringements when someone sends you a link, you are already late. The listing has been live, it has been selling, and the version of events you are reacting to is weeks or months old. E-commerce enforcement has quietly become one of the more common things owners ask us about, and the reason is simple: trade moved online, and infringement moved with it. In some markets the shift is near-total. Experts at the CIOPORA AGM 2026 noted that around 90 per cent of plants in China are now sold online, against roughly 10 per cent in Europe.
For a long time, protecting a variety meant watching fields, growers, and physical channels. That work still matters. But a growing share of the activity that should concern an owner now happens on marketplaces, in listings that are easy to create, easy to repeat, and very hard to see unless you are looking on purpose.
Why the online channel is harder to police
Three things make e-commerce a difficult front. The first is volume. There are more listings, on more platforms, in more languages, than any owner can watch by hand. The second is distance. A listing can sit on a marketplace in one country, selling material that infringes a right held in another, under a seller identity that tells you nothing. The third is persistence. Take one listing down and the same seller often returns under a new name, so a single takedown rarely settles anything.
The result is a channel where infringement is both more accessible to the infringer and less visible to the owner. That combination is why so many owners only discover online activity by accident, and why, by then, it has usually done some quiet commercial harm.
An unauthorised listing costs more than its own sales. It erodes price, confuses buyers about who is authorised, and signals that the variety is fair game.
What proactive looks like
The practical shift is from chasing individual links to watching the channel deliberately. That starts with visibility: knowing which platforms matter for your varieties and territories, and monitoring them rather than waiting to be told. It continues with a structured response: well-evidenced takedown requests through the platforms' own IP channels, and a way of tracking sellers who reappear, so you are managing the recurring pattern rather than one listing at a time.
The platforms increasingly meet this halfway. Alibaba, for instance, reports that its AI-driven monitoring now blocks the large majority of suspected infringing listings, around 86 per cent, before a sale is made (Alibaba Group). The catch is that it only works when rights holders feed the system accurate, current data; as one CIOPORA AGM panel put it, six-month-old data is an age. Keeping that picture fresh is much of what proactive monitoring is for.
None of this requires treating every listing as a courtroom matter. Most online situations are resolved through the platforms themselves or through a direct commercial conversation, and they are resolved faster and more cheaply when caught early. The work is mostly about seeing clearly and acting in proportion, rather than escalating.
A breeder in Australia is a fair example. Their protected variety was appearing in listings on a large overseas marketplace, sold by accounts with no licence and no obvious link to each other. Individually, each listing looked minor. Together, they were establishing the variety as something buyers could source from anyone, which is precisely the perception an owner cannot afford to let settle. The fix was undramatic: a steady, evidenced process of monitoring and takedowns, run as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-off reaction.
Where this connects to the rest of your protection
Online enforcement is the same question an owner already asks, posed in the channel where more of the action now sits: where is my variety being moved without authorisation, and how quickly can I see it. This is part of what we built Argus to support, a variety-specific view of exposure that includes the online channel rather than treating it as someone else's department.
The owners who handle this well tend to be the ones who see the online channel early and respond calmly and consistently. Aggressive enforcement matters less than that. If your current answer to "what is happening to our varieties online" is "we find out when a customer tells us," that is the gap that tends to cost the most, and the one most worth closing.
Frequently asked questions
How does plant variety infringement show up on e-commerce platforms?
Usually as listings for protected varieties, propagating material, or branded produce sold without authorisation, often across borders and under seller names that mean nothing to you. The listings can look entirely legitimate to a buyer, which is part of why they do commercial damage before anyone with the rights notices.
Can you actually get unauthorised listings taken down?
Often, yes, though it depends on the platform, the right, and the evidence. Most major marketplaces have IP complaint channels, and a well-evidenced request tends to move. The harder part is usually not the single takedown but the pattern: sellers reappear, so the useful question is how you monitor and respond on an ongoing basis rather than one listing at a time.
Is this worth the effort if the volumes online look small?
Depending on the case, it can be. Online channels rarely stay small, and an unauthorised listing does more than its own volume suggests: it can erode price, confuse buyers about who is authorised, and signal to others that the variety is fair game. In our experience it is easier to hold a line early than to recover one later.
We sell mostly through traditional channels. Does e-commerce enforcement still matter to us?
In our view it often does, because your buyers and your infringers may be online even when your own sales are not. Visibility into the online channel tells you things about your wider market, who is moving your variety and where, that traditional channels will not surface until much later.
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About the author
Tomer Biran, Founder of Greenstone
Tomer Biran is the founder of Greenstone. He has spent more than twenty years on both sides of the table: as a qualified lawyer and former General Counsel to international organisations across multiple jurisdictions, and as a founder and operator of B2B and B2C businesses across the UK, EU, and US. He has served as General Manager of a leading plant breeders' company with a global footprint and as General Counsel of an international fresh produce marketing group. He holds a Master of Law and Business from WHU and Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, where he was a Joachim Herz Excellence Scholar, and a Bachelor of Laws. That blend of commercial operating experience and legal depth is what drives Greenstone's commercial-first approach to plant variety rights and commercialisation.
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