I apologise to the noble Lord if I am sending him to sleep, but this is a complex area. Patent lawyers will dance on the head of a pin on some of these issues. As I said, we have worked with the Intellectual Property Office to get this exactly right and to address precisely the point he made earlier about some of the difficulties that were faced, with large international companies owning the rights to seed entitlements. That caused great difficulty in the past.
I shall just read one bit to him again, and if the noble Lord could try to stay awake, it will be an achievement that I will rejoice in. The Bill does not make any changes to laws associated with obtaining a patent; nor does it alter the process by which an applicant would apply for patent protections. Breeders wishing to patent their precision-bred plant or animal should therefore undertake this process in the same manner as for all other inventions and under the guidance of the Intellectual Property Office.
The Bill is also an attempt to provide precisely the balance that the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, stressed. We want to secure the rights of those who are investing enormous amounts of money in the development of these technologies, while also not making it impossible for farmers—precisely the people we want to have access to these technologies—to have access. That is the balance we are seeking to achieve.
I can work only on the best legal advice I am given. There are noble Lords in this Committee whose speciality is intellectual property law, and I am sure they could dance much more dextrously on the head of that particular pin than I.