Ok ill entertain this one alitttle longer. Explain how. He break into his house or collective? NOBODY owns a plant you fucktard. What now because I sell black cherry soda clones I should kick back some to subcool? Your a real retard and not just like the ones in movies
Ever heard of "honor"? There is a code of ethics that applies here, though clearly not everyone chooses to follow it.
You can sell all the cuts of "Black cherry Soda" you like, so long as you say they're "Black Cherry Soda". But if you call these cuts "eyeball pie" and claim you've bred the line yourself, you're crossing the line. No, you won't go to "jail" for this, but that doesn't make it right or ethical, and you shouldn't be surprised if the original breeders give you the hairy eyeball if you choose to do this.
Should you be paying royalties to Subcool for selling cuts of his strain?
Legally speaking, you aren't obligated to; at least not now because these sorts of strains can't be patented. But if you were talking about, say, a specially bred strain of tomatoes or some other plant Subcool potentially could have patented it, and if so, damn right you'd owe him royalties if you were selling seeds or clones of his creation.
Ditto for trademark. Right now, illegal drug strain names aren't able to be trademarked under Federal case law. Therefore anyone can call anything they like "Subcools Black Cherry Soda" (legit or not) and sell it, and there isn't anything Subcool can legally do to stop it. But just because you "can" do this, doesn't make it right.
If you tried this with "Dr. Brown's Cherry Soda" (ie the actual beverage) mixing up your own version of their drink and calling it "Dr Browns", they'd have a legal course of action against you. Why shouldn't this be true with cannabis strains that people have spent time and money developing?
On breeding, obviously EVERYONE has to start somewhere, and since cannabis has "only" been selectively bred by humans for 10,000 years, everyone is going to be starting with a line worked for centuries by people before. Unless you're literally going to feral or wild cannabis strains to start with, ALL breeders MUST start with other people's lines.
But there is a "right" way and a wrong way to go about this.
Its perfectly fine to start with other people's genetics, cross them, make your own line and sell the ceeds. The honorable ones who do this will correctly attribute the parents, if asked. Its perfectly fine to sell S1s of "clone only" lines too, especially when in many cases the origins of those lines are uncertain (so you can't really attribute them even if you wanted to).
What's NOT OK, is to take someone else's highly worked or inbred line, from a project they may have worked on for several years at great expense and/or personal risk, knock off a few bags of F1 ceeds, then sell the resultant beans as the same "name" line, or (maybe worse) just rename the line and take credit for developing it. Of course there are plenty of "breeders" who do this very thing every single day, but its about as close to theft of intellectual property as you're going to see in this game.
Again, just because there is no law against it, doesn't make it "right".
