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?

Tim Malbon Founding Partner

Tim founded influential digital product design company Made by Many in 2007. He’s a leading voice in the emerging practice area of product design and innovation, customer experience and business strategy. He’s the Webby Awards UK Ambassador and a member of the IADAS, and was recently named by Creative Review as one of the 50 Creative Leaders "driving change, not just within their organisation but in the world at large."

@malbonster

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P2P gardening community site swapping seeds: copyright theft?