New Apple Varieties Trademarked, Patented and Licensed

On All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviews John Seabrook about his latest article in The New Yorker:

BLOCK: Okay. Now, apart from the qualities that make this apple remarkable, your story is also a business story because Sweet Tango has a trademark. It's what's called a managed apple. Why don't you explain what that means?
SEABROOK: Well, as most people who shop for apples have probably observed, in the last 10 years or so, a lot of new varieties have come into the supermarkets with names like Pink Lady, Gala, Jazz.
Sweet Tango is kind of the next of those modern apples that are all trademarked. They also all are patented, of course. Growers have to pay the university, in this case, for a license to grow the tree and they're trademarked, so they also have to pay a royalty on the number of apples that they sell.
BLOCK: I'd never thought about the business of apples in quite this way. The university here is the University of Minnesota, which has a very active apple breeding program, and they have set up a consortium, right, to market and...
SEABROOK: Right. So the deal is that the Honey Crisp apple was released in an open release and that meant that anybody who wanted to could grow it, anywhere they wanted to grow it, in any way they wanted to grow it. And that meant that the quality of the Honey Crisp varied widely.
So with the new apple, with the Sweet Tango, the university decided they were going to manage the release and that meant that, in order to grow the apple, you have to be granted the right to grow it by this consortium. And if they don't like where you're growing it or who you are or what your track record is, they won't give you that license.
Also, it means that you can't sell your apples to a supermarket. You have to sell them to the consortium and they do the marketing. Overall, it's an attempt to control the quality of the apple and ensure the long term longevity of the brands.

What a strange new world we live in.  Animal and plant patents are going to be troublesome issues in the near future, I believe.