A brief summary of the revision of § 34a of the German Patent Law regarding the requirements for the use of genetic resources was published in BIO Deutschland Rechtsinfo aktuell August 2016.

Since the implementation of § 34a into the German Patent Law, the applicant is invited to provide information on the geographic origin of biological resources used in the context of the invention. Contravening against this regulation is explicitly lacking any legal consequence. In the view of the international CBD Convention on Biological Diversity, the Nagoya-Protocol supplementing the aforementioned, and resulting EU regulation 511/2014, the legislator has now added a second paragraph to § 34a PatG. Now, the information on the origin of used species provided in the application is transmitted to the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation. This may have consequences in the view of the “sharing benefits” system of the CBD that should be taken into consideration when filing patent applications.

Source: BIO Deutschland Rechtsinfo aktuell August 2016