User:Peter coxhead/Cultivar names and trade designations

This essay incorporates text from Teahouse.

Distinction
There is a difference between a cultivar name, which is a unique name for a cultivar, regulated by the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP), and a "trade designation" or "selling name", which is not.

Cultivar names cannot be trademarks, and must be freely usable. They are capitalized and written within single quotes. They are the definitive names of cultivars, and so the names by which they are registered. Like scientific names, cultivars can inadvertently be given more than one cultivar name, in which case the first published has priority and the others become synonyms (but are still cultivar names).

Trade designations can be, and often are, trademarked, in order to give plant breeders more intellectual property rights than an initial patent does. The same cultivar often has different trade designations, particularly in different countries. Trade designations are not written within single quotes. The ICNCP suggests that trade designations should be written in a different way (e.g. using a different font or small capitals) to ensure they are distinguishable from cultivar names. In the English Wikipedia, this can be achieved by using. For example,  produces "Rosa ". Even if using a different font isn't wanted, it is useful to enclose trade designations within this template to make it clear that they are not cultivar names and should not be within single quotes. For example,  produces "Rosa ".

It's in the interest of breeders to create non-intuitive names as formal cultivar names (e.g. 'WEKgobnez') and to use those names when registering a patent, but then to create far more memorable trademarked selling names in the hope that buyers will continue to seek the plant by these names after the patent expires. (Pharmaceutical companies have similar incentives in naming drugs; e.g. Viagra versus sildenafil.) However, trademark holders do run a risk of having their trademark genericized and losing trademarks if the trademarked term becomes widely used to refer to similar products. If a trade designation for a plant is frequently (mis)represented as a cultivar name then that contributes to trademark genericization. There's a good overview of the issues with cultivar names versus trade designations here if you are interested in reading further.

An example of the different kinds of name is Rosa 'KORbin', the definitive cultivar name for a rose known by the trade designation Rosa in English, and Rosa  in German.

Article titles
Naming conventions (flora) indicates a preference for formal cultivar names as article titles. It notes that "there is currently no consensus as to how to represent trade designations in Wikipedia". While trade designations of plants could be appropriate titles on Wikipedia, these terms are usually trademarks, and Wikipedia doesn't usually have article titles that genericize a trademark (thus Viagra is a redirect to sildenafil, Kleenex is an article about that specific brand of facial tissues, and Bayer hasn't resisted the genericization of the trademarked Heroin for obvious reasons). However, currently there is no consistency. Articles with trade designation titles are formatted in various ways, and some articles that are apparently following the correct single quote convention for formal cultivar names actually have a trade designation between the single quotes.

In summary, there's a complex trade-off between following the ICNCP, maintaining recognizability, and respecting intellectual property rights, a trade-off which is not yet resolved.