Corteva is suing seed startup Inari for intellectual property theft, alleging in a lawsuit filed in federal court Wednesday that Inari tweaked biotech traits in Corteva’s seeds and is now trying to obtain U.S. patents for them.
“The lawsuit alleges that Inari deliberately used a third-party agent to obtain protected Corteva seeds, illegally exported the seeds out of the United States, made slight genetic modifications of the biotech traits and is seeking U.S. patents for those modified traits,” Corteva said in a news release.
Among the products mentioned is Qrome, a herbicide-resistant corn seed that offers protection from corn rootworm.
The lawsuit itself says it “seeks to prevent Inari from continuing its brazen efforts to steal Corteva’s groundbreaking, patent-protected work. Inari’s deceptive and unlawful conduct violates Corteva’s intellectual property rights, as well as Inari’s own contractual obligations.”
The lawsuit alleges deceptive practices that violate Massachusetts and federal law. (Inari is based in Massachusetts.)
Inari did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“When Inari first disclosed to Corteva, in September 2021, that it had acquired two of Corteva’s proprietary events and would seek to monetize them, Inari sought to pressure Corteva into a quid pro quo agreement under which Inari offered to not sell corn seeds containing these two proprietary events that Corteva had developed only if Corteva would provide Inari financial incentive in the form of an agreement to use Inari’s soybean products,” the lawsuit says.
The suit, filed in federal court in Delaware, also says “upon information and belief, Inari does not have a seed breeding program of its own. Instead, it employs genetic modification techniques to alter high quality seeds that other entities have already engineered and brought to market.”
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In an opinion piece posted last week on Agri-Pulse.com, Corteva Chief Technology and Digital Officer Sam Eathington said “bad actors are trying to skirt the law so they can steal American technology.” He did not name Inari, but noted that “agricultural innovations take decades of research and testing and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to bring to market.”
Corteva, the lawsuit says, “is seeking damages to adequately compensate for Inari’s past unlawful actions as well as a permanent injunction against Inari prohibiting any future actions in violation of Corteva’s intellectual property and state-law rights or benefitting from their actions in violation of such rights.”
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