Is it ok to trade patented plants on Garden.org?
I assume it is not ok to sell them.

Over the years I've heard a few people say, it's not illegal to propagate for your own use or for giving to family and friends ... just illegal to sell the plants. I may be wrong but I think when a plant is patented, all rights of the plant belong to the person who originally created the plant and went through the process of registering and acquiring the patent and it is illegal to propagate for any purpose. If a plant naturally goes to seed and you end up with new plants, that may be different but I'm not sure. I think I've read that patents may expire after some amount of time but I don't really know for sure how it all works.

Here are a few articles with information regarding propagation of patented and registered plants:
https://www.noble.org/news/pub...
http://www.davewilson.com/plan...
http://extension.oregonstate.e...

So according to law when a patented heuchera starts declining after several years and needs division and replanting to survive we're just supposed to let them die?
Not happening in my garden.

I'm sure you can divide your Heuchera for planting elsewhere in your own garden but I just don't know what the legalities would be for trading or selling.

Just wondering what Garden.org's policy is. I have at least 6 nice Heuchera 'Kassandra' I would like to list for trade. Acceptable?

One of the site owners/administrators ( @Dave @jon @Trish) will have to answer the question of whether it's a good idea to list on the garden.org plant trading forum.

Thanks for your help. I love Garden.org and want to be sure I follow the rules.

The General rule of thumb is that you can't trade/sell patented plants. This includes propagating and selling them for profit, or to trade them. The point of the patent is to prevent other people from profiting from the plants that the creator patented.

To further clarify Jon's post-

Garden.org's official policy on plant trading is that the owners do not take any responsibility whatsoever. We do not police the trading of plants. It is up to each trader to research the laws- national as well as state laws for any and all plant trading.

Thanks for the further clarification.