(Comments below are made with the assumption that the scenarios in question are terminal efforts that result in no further action. Therefore, I appeal to anyone who has undertaken such endeavors not to interpret my comments in anyway critical or framed as a pejorative. If you make S1s as part of a larger breeding program these comments could not apply)
I would say there is a clear difference between the scenarios provided. First, what is at issue here isn't whether or not every pre-existing genetic ingredient (parent plants, grandparents, etc.) is the product of your breeding, but whether or not the "chuck" in question is such a product. To shift the arbiter of "yours" to whether you made everything that came before it, is to create scenario where there can be, at best, only one breeder ever. Cannabis wasn't invented from nothing, therefore there would only be the first person who ever found it and selected parents to make the first bred seeds. By your paradigm, anyone who came after this proto-breeder can't be considered a breeder of specific things because they would be using plants, "neither of which are original chucks" of theirs.
The defining arbiter to decide if "the end product [is] any more yours" would be whether or not you bred the end product. The defining quality of breeding is selection. The goal of breeding is to identify plants that act as exemplars of specific desirable traits and to control their mating in such a way as to make offspring manifest these traits through inheritance.
Assuming in your first scenario that you grew and selected the 2 different plants to chuck, then you made selections based on your personal assessment of to what degree
your plants best exhibited a set of traits
you subjectively deemed desirable. Here,
you have taken the initiative to decide what was desirable and made selections with the goal of producing progeny that exhibited parental traits in such a ratio that they offer something the parents did not. In this scenario, you have engaged in breeding.
Assuming in your second scenario that you started with a well-known clone, then at no point will you have impressed your selection bias on the process when making S1 seeds. You would have received a phenotype that someone
other than you selected from a population. This lack of selection on
your part would not technically meet the definition of breeding and can therefore be more of a mechanical seed-making endeavor.
(I’ll take a moment to preempt an attempt at sophistry, namely, to say that you “selected” to use that clone. This is to generalize far from the accepted understanding of the selection process from a population and would allow for a slippery slope deteriorating into Hobson’s Choice; whereby my selection not to ever grow is itself a breeding decision.)
While you own title to the seeds of both scenarios, the first is the only product that was the result of your breeding while the second was the consequence of a simple seed-making process. If I remove you from the scenarios, I would never be able to accomplish the first, as I would need
you to decide the traits and make the selections. I could produce the exact same seeds without you in the second scenario. It is because your involvement is so instrumental in the first, whereas is not necessary in the second, that you would consider it more “
yours” than the S1.
I can conceive of different versions of your scenarios (chuck F1 vs S1): Chucking a female and male that someone else gave you and S1-ing a female that you selected. With these amendments, the roles switch and the S1 is more “yours” than the chuck. Regardless of the possible permutations of scenarios, all I must illustrate is that there is a difference in the scenarios spelled out in your original statement such that you could not make an all-encompassing insinuation that there is
no difference between them and that one could not consider either product “anymore yours”. There is a difference based on your role as breeder vs. seed-maker.
This was made in response to a situation described where these products would be sold. Your question is making an equivalence between F2-ing a currently available F1 from a different breeder and a cross that you made from different lines of your own selection. While you did made selections from the F1 to make the F2, the problem here isn’t whether or not you can consider the product “yours”, but whether or not it would be a fair representation of the F1 and be marketed as such.
If you were to take Dino Berry Bites F1 and make F2, but sell them as “Dino Berry Bites”, you would be doing Eso a disservice. My point is not one of morality (whether one should sell F2 of a currently available F1 and take market share), but one of genetic inheritance. F1 generations can be have very stable trait expressions which, in theory, can be homogenous. Take Mendel’s peas for example:
Here you can see the dominant allele for “smooth” peas (S) will express in all F1 progeny. So the Dino Berry Bites (DBB) F1 could be bred for a similar homogeneity that was intended to express across all phenotypes. If you now take two of the F1 plants to make F2 we now have a different outcome:
Now the permutations give us 25% expression of the recessive “wrinkled” pea (s) in our population.
To market the F2 as F1 would be trying to profit from the prestige and interest in the DBB F1 while adulterating the experience the breeder intended with all sorts of recessive expressions. This is why F2 seeds are generally used to peer into some of the more parental and grandparental traits that lurk in a line.
You could market your seeds as Dino Berry Bites F2 so that you could at least absolve yourself of any deceptive marketing, but then slip back into the moral question of whether it is “right” to sell F2 while the original F1 is still being sold. I think this moral question has been dealt with already so I leave that alone. My intent was to show that there is a difference between F1 and F2 of the same line such that there needs to be a marked distinction.
