SAN FRANCISCO (CN) - A federal judge delivered a mixed ruling for the University of California and two researchers in their battle over the rights to coveted strawberry plants that hold "considerable commercial potential."
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria’s Thursday ruling came out partially favoring the university and partially favoring Douglas Shaw and Kirk Larson, two former UC Davis research scientists, on their dueling intellectual property, patent infringement and contract claims, which will go to trial May 15.
"There is evidence to support the contention that the university acted in bad faith," Chhabria wrote in his 19-page ruling. "But given the language of this agreement, if Shaw and Larson believed the university was acting in bad faith, the solution was to assign the rights under protest and then seek to undo the assignment, not to refuse to assign the rights in the first place."
Despite the mixed ruling, a university representative was optimistic.
"We are pleased with the judge’s decision and look forward to the proceedings on May 15," UC Davis spokesperson Dana Topousis said Friday.
Shaw and Larson ran UC Davis’ strawberry breeding program for 22 years until they retired in 2014, forming California Berry Cultivars (CBC) to sell their strawberries commercially.
CBC, with Shaw and Larson at the helm, expected to continue developing the UC Davis varieties using the same germplasm — stock strains of valuable genes — Shaw and Larson developed at UC Davis. The researchers sued the Regents of the University of California in Alameda County Superior Court last May for access to them.
They were added as defendants to the federal lawsuit earlier this week.
"All along the way we had hoped that the long and valuable relations that all of us have had with the UC would help lead to a multiple-benefit collaboration," said A.G. Kawamura, president of CBC and former California Agriculture Secretary, in an email Friday. "Unfortunately, it has been much the opposite, and we hope to find out why through this difficult but critical legal process."
Shaw and Larson developed more than a dozen strawberry varieties at UC Davis that are grown throughout the world. In 2004, they released the Albion variety, known for its sweetness and high yield. It is the most widely planted strawberry in California today.
UC Davis' top-ranked agriculture school has developed 56 varieties of strawberries since 1945. More than 80 percent of the strawberries grown in North America and more than 60 percent worldwide were developed at the school. California strawberries rake in $2.5 billion a year, making them the state’s fifth most-valuable crop.
Shaw and Larson assigned their strawberry plant rights to CBC in 2016 after the university denied the company access to them. However, they had signed employment and patent contracts with the university, too, agreeing to disclose to it any plants they developed there that had the potential to be patented, and to assign their rights to the university for any of the plants it deemed worth patenting.