Argentine government favors farmers in dispute with Monsanto
en.mercopress.com
en.mercopress.com
I don't use the phrase "evil" often to describe corporations but Monsanto makes the cut.
They sue people who have ~90%+ Monsanto crops on their fields who aren't paying royalties.
You can't get 90% of a different cultivar from pollen blowing multiple miles into your field. It doesn't work that way.
In fact, the company has offered to pay to remove accidentally contaminated crops for you, so that they can't be sued for having their IP on your farm.
Their business model depends on farmers agreeing to licensing their seeds. Nothing says that those farmers have to agree to that. If those same seeds are available elsewhere, whether brought by the wind or just bought locally, a farmer who has NOT signed any sort of agreement can do whatever they'd like with them.
PC-Company-A signs no license with Microsoft. An employee of theirs finds a copy of Microsoft Windows laying on the ground.
Having no agreement with MSFT, and having discovered Windows "on the wind", as it were, they start to install it on their PCs.
Is it Microsoft's business? PC-Company-A has no license with them, why should it matter?
I ask, because it would be pretty easy to add a jump in the Windows binary to skip the EULA -- Free Windows for life!
1. Copyright would not be involved because copyright cover the reproduction and distribution of content. You did neither. It'd be the same if someone photocopied a book and you found the copy on the ground. You might argue that "well, you need to copy the software from the DVD to the system". If that's a problem, imagine that the mysterious individual also somehow installed the OS on your computer without your knowledge.
2. Patent law doesn't apply because patents (in theory) cover the application of techniques and technologies. Patents are irrelevant to end-users.
3. As stated before, the EULA also doesn't apply.
IMO, applying patents to living organisms is completely bogus, conceptually. It'd make more sense if the genetic information of the organism was copyrighted. Then it would make some sense to talk about unlicensed copies being made, although it'd still be rather tenuous. Copyright wasn't thought for self-replicating and randomly-modifying data. Has a law been broken if a disc undergoes mitosis? How many words would you need to change for a book to no longer be considered the same?
They would certainly be able to do something about that person, if said person would start distributing copies.
Also, question: What if, unknowingly to this person, the OS had been modified to act as a BitTorrent client and seed copies of itself?
How amazing does an invention have to be before you guys will let a company protect it?
We should not be able patent/copyright seeds at all for obvious reasons, it's what people use to survive every day... And if that means that Monsanto will die and the research should be made public, then I'm all for it. No company should have that kind of power at all.
> Their business model depends on farmers agreeing to licensing their seeds. Nothing says that those farmers have to agree to that.
The entire concept of patents disagrees with you. If the farmers don't agree to a license, they cannot legally use the invention.
I'll leave it an exercise to the reader on whether I agree with idea of patents on plants (or software).
35 U.S.C § 271 makes it their business.
The Roundup corn was grown in the neighbouring field.
The Schmeisers had to sue Monsanto in the small claims court for $640, because Monsanto refused to remove the corn, nor would they allow the Schmeisers to do so.
They would only remove the corn if the Schmeisers signed a gag order which they were not prepared to do.
The Schmeisers ( now growing mustard as their seedstock no longer belonged to them ) paid their neighbours $640 to remove the corn.
The facts are the opposite of what you suggest.
From that very article: the trial judge found that with respect to the 1998 crop, "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's 1998 crop.
Say what you want about the business practices, your example of a company legally enforcing their licensing agreements is probably not the best if you're trying to demonstrate "evil".
One does not normally start spraying ones crops with RoundUp. This, as they say, kills the crop. That the farmer did so and just happened to wind up with a large population of RoundUp Ready plants clearly suggests that the farmer was breeding them selectively to get the Monsanto patented plants for free, not just that they "happened" to be there and reproduce.
Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2]
[1] http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/gm-seed-accidentally... [2] http://www.allowgoldenricenow.org/the-crime-against-humanity
I disagree that anything is wrong with doing that. The way I see it, he identified that a number of plants were resistant to RoundUp and efficiently figured out which they were.
It's not his fault that Monsanto's business model fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds.
> Monsanto has the worst PR team in history, which has made my company’s work much harder, but ‘Monsanto is Evil’ is a marketing slogan developed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth etc. These environmental groups are actually the true evil in the industry. Their campaigning has held back progress in the industry by many years. Smarter folks than me argue that their actions on Golden Rice meet all the criteria to be considered a crime against humanity[2]
Friend of the earth (lower case without a ™ symbol) sure, but I'm no tree hugger. I'm not against GMOs and think Golden Rice is amazing. I just don't like the idea of imposing licensing restrictions on farmers. It's a dark road that we don't need to go down.
For what it's worth I agree with you, but this is a political problem as it's congress that sets those rules. Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed.
My company (www.taxa.com) makes GMO plants which are not regulated for sale in the United States (which some people thing is a bad idea). But because we have so much lower cost of getting to market we've decided to follow a open source model. Our hope is that if we can continuously improve the product people will come back for the next generation version anyway. But we can only have this model because of the way our products are regulated.
So if I wanted to create a GMO and sell it in Argentina, I'd have to pay a premium? At what stage of development does payment occur or is it a tax on sales?
This is a terrible argument.
Is Microsoft to blame for Windows piracy because CDs are easy to copy?
These cases aren't accidental - the farmer was very clearly copying the technology and using it to their benefit without contributing to the IP costs.
Farmers almost never grow seed crop. You're making generalizations about an industry you don't know much about.
>sues farmers for re-planting seeds that blew onto their land
The farmers being sued never purchased or sought out the seeds in question. They blew into their land by natural processes (wind) and grew of their own course. The farmers in question then replanted the seeds that were growing in their fields.
At no point did they do anything equivalent to paying or licensing the software. Nor did they intentionally plant the first generation of plants.
Edit: In regards to the generalization comment, I was making my analogy based on the description given by the original comment. I fail to see how I extrapolated beyond the clear meaning of the description.
>Fact: Monsanto has never sued a farmer when trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits were present in the farmer’s field as an accident or as a result of inadvertent means. ... The misperception that Monsanto would sue a farmer if GM seed was accidentally in his field likely began with Percy Schmeiser, who was brought to court in Canada by Monsanto for illegally saving Roundup Ready® canola seed.
That's analogous to continuing to use a software license after your agreed-upon contract is up, not torrenting.
Patents (and copyrights) are on new genetic stacks, because the development, testing, and field trials put into it involves resources (costs).
Because your business has costs does not justify enacting artificial restrictions.
If you're going to generalize patents and copyrights as just "a business having costs" then you're grossly oversimplifying it.
It could also be looked at, "The USPTO, and Congress, have allowed patent and copyright holders the ability to rent seek far beyond what was ever intended when the USPTO, copyright, and patents were first conceived."
You can now replant your roundup ready seeds, toomuchtodo, as much as you want.
Good luck with that, considering the constitution grants Congress the power to promote scientific progress through granting limited exclusive rights to authors. I doubt they will find invalidating seed patents aligned with promoting scientific progress.
Edit: nice redaction
I'd be worried if I didn't think I'd be able to drop seeds into a PCR machine in ~10 years, and dump their genome online in a matter of hours. I'm not worried.
Sigh... Law is a social construct. It was decided that it is in the public interest to provide periods of exclusivity in exchange for public disclosure, because afterwards the public can make free use of the information. Otherwise, everything would be trade secrets, and everything would have to be reverse engineered. Things like generic drugs probably wouldn't exist -- if Coke can protect a recipe for 70 years, I doubt the drug companies would have much issue doing the same. And I'm sure there's plenty of technology that strategically stays out of patent space, because it's more valuable without public disclosure.
> And that's enforced by privately negotiated treaty with other countries, without the consent of their citizens?
Are you implying that all law must be ratified by every citizen before being enacted? Because otherwise, your voting for your representatives was your consent.
> Are you implying that all law must be ratified by every citizen before being enacted?
No. I'm implying that government representatives outside the US are voting in favor of laws that are in direct opposition of their citizens' interests (you've heard of the TPP? Of course you have), and that in most cases there is no short-term recourse (short of protests and bloodshed).
Enter stage right "civil disobedience" and the ignoring of copyright law worldwide through online distribution of media. Its already starting to happen with 3D scanning/printing, and will eventually happen with genetic information (including patented seeds).
A widespread arms race of decoys and analytical countermeasures is still bad, of course.
Intelectual Property is protected by copyright. I leave here a translation of an extract for that law. It only allows "inventions" as something that can have a patent. And in its 6th article, it explicitly excludes the following:
Article 6 - They are not considered inventions for the purposes of this law:
a) Discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
b) Literary or artistic works or any other aesthetic creation and scientific works;
c) Plans, rules and methods for performing intelectual activities, playing games or for economic and business activities as well as computer programs;
d) Ways of presenting information,
e) Surgical, diagnostics or therapeutic treatment methods, applicable to the human body and animals;
f) The juxtaposition of known inventions or mixtures of known products, variations in their form, dimensions or materials, except in the case of combination or merger so that they can not function separately or that the qualities or functions thereof are modified to obtain an industrial result not obvious to a person skilled in the art;
g) All kinds of living matter and substances preexisting in nature.
Art. 7 - Are not patentable:
a) Inventions whose exploitation in the territory of Argentina must be prevented to protect public order or morality, health or life of people or animals or to preserve plants or avoid serious damage to the environment
b) All existing biological and genetic material in nature or a replica thereof, in the biological processes implicit in animal, plant and human reproduction, including genetic processes involving material capable of conducting its own duplication in normal and free conditions as it happens in the nature.
For example, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent most countries exclude software patents or computer programs, and lots of them are also signatories of many of the same treaties. So, its a very complex situation.
Also, and curiously, it seems that the article 1350 of the Civil Code Of The Russian Federation, is almost the same word by word. So, my guess is that this kind of wording exists in many other countries.
http://civil-code.narod.ru/ch69-art1349-1350.html
PS: I find it amusing to be down-voted just for translating the text of the law. I swear didn't write it, lol.
This is probably because quoting the translated law looked like attempting to intentionally obfuscate.
The very point is that IPR can be defended by using some other name for it than "patent", so quoting a piece of law that says what cannot be "patented" is not relevant when the rights are granted by some other law - and in the case of Argentina they should be, because it is signatory to international convention that obligates it to have such a law.
Seed rights don't have to be protected by "patents". For instance, in my country, the name (translated to English) "plant breeder's right". It has its own piece of legislation, and it is in many ways like a patent, but it is not called a patent. In the US, the same thing is called a patent, but that is just terminology.
That isn't a comparable claim. Microsoft is responsible for their choice of business model.
> because CDs are easy to copy?
You shouldn't expect profit when your business model relies on scarcity that doesn't exist in nature. Attempting to impose artificial scarcity doesn't work, for the same reason you cannot make a law that changes gravity. Trying to change laws of nature by fiat only makes you look foolish.
Note that Microsoft can still run a profitable business even when their CDs are easy to copy. They did this for decades. For most of that time, they didn't spend much effort trying to stop piracy; unpaid copies helped maintain their desktop monopoly. If they were successful in stopping piracy, people might have learned about an alternative OS.
An argument can be made that copyright and patent worked before the digital era.
The trick that Claude Shannon introduced may have been intended to remove noise, but that's not all it did. Digital encoding allowed data to be repeated indefinitely. Put another way, data was scarce when it gains noise (lower s/n) each time it is re-amplified; Shannon's encoding schemes allowed perfect copies, and thus data was no longer scarce.
> copyright and patents exist exactly to create artificial scarcity
Copyright and patent cannot create scarcity, nor were they intended to. They rebalanced existing scarcity.
Also you're right, patents and copyrights are not there to create scarcity - an IP owner can use a license that allows absolutely everyone to use it. They exist to give the owner a timeframe with which to recooperate costs of IP generation (and yes, the copyright timeframe is too long but patents are reasonable).
Okay, great, this doesn't matter to you, but surely it's a relevant detail for other people who are deciding whether Monsanto is "evil"? Specifically, for anyone who doesn't already share your set of beliefs about what should be patentable, this is a crucial piece of information.
Seriously, even for those who do believe that plants should not be patentable, "farmer willfully breaks (unjust) patent laws" is a different story than "Monsanto blew seeds onto a farmer's property and then sued him for it."
http://passel.unl.edu/pages/informationmodule.php?idinformat... > The crop produced from open-pollinated seed harvested from a single-cross hybrid will not be as productive as the original single cross.
There's a lot of misinformation in this thread, as usual on this topic.
I would have a big problem with licensing myself if the patents lasted 80 years, but, in practice, by the time a patent goes offline, people were buying better anyway. And if at some point agricultural process slows down enough, then we all get the benefit anyway.
Actually the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent [#141,072](http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=US000141072&SectionNum=4...) with a claim to yeast .
Patenting the food supply is one of the scariest things for the developing world. Certainly vitamin A deficiency is a real problem but we are then trading that problem for giving one company absolute power over a group of people with very few resources to defend themselves.
Monsanto have now agreed to provide royalty-free licenses for its technologies to help fast-track the further development and distribution of the rice.
Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2560613/pdf/1110...
Once a developing country's economy has become entangled with the crop, start charging rent.
The Phillipine government has since largely solved their vitamin A deficiency problem through a lower-tech and cheaper approach: vitamin supplements.
What we all can do today is respect our opponents. Their values do not align with ours. That does not make them evil. Let’s call them misguided.
This is a common tactic on the far left and far right:
"You can't just ban all abortions, what about rape?" "Baby killer!"
"Clearly some abortions are unconstitutional, like once the baby is viable." "Misogynist!"
"You can't just have completely open borders, it would bankrupt the safety net." "Racist!"
"You can't just close the borders, lots of industries rely on immigrant labor." "Shill!"
Camapigning from the hippies, but also from WFP and WHO, mean that terminator genes aren't going to be used, and that farmers will be allowed to reuse the seed, and that the manufacturers will do more testing.
Especially since you're probably going to continue supplementing iron and zinc and iodine you may as well keep supplementing with vit A and not releasing the GMO.
The Schmeisers did not use Roundup and so owed Monsanto no money - ruled the Canadian Supreme Court in 2004. (Schmeiser vs Monsanto) - but their unpatented seeds did belong to Monsanto.
It will be interesting to see how this is decided when plants have genes from multiple IP holders.
And I'm talking about copyright/patent laws here, not wages, so it's even less related.
Farmers produce food and have property rights to their products; they can then sell food (or donate). Companies produce new plant varieties, and they have intellectual property rights to their products which they can sell (and sometimes they donate as well).
If you cannot have IPR to new seed breeds, there is less economic and other incentive to create new ones, and you'll have less development of technology.
And the very reason that mankind has less hunger today than it has ever had (in proportion to population, and also in absolute terms in hundreds of years) is development of technology.
(By the way, farmers generally don't get wages; they get earnings, like companies do.)
That's why, because of this conflict, I'm not advocating for private company to product seeds, it's one of those markets (like health-care or public infrastructure) where the incentives will never be align whatever law you put in place. I would therefore advocate to move seeds to public research.
And I also agree with the technology part but none of what I can think of has similar problems to the seeds.
Monsanto, Dupont, BASF et. al. seed manufactures exploit a court case started by General Electric when they wanted to patent bacteria to clean up oil spills. The US Patent office didn't allow patents on biological material. GE won this case...and then dropped research on the bacteria because it turned out to be horribly damaging to the environment and pretty useless as a product.
This opened the window for many other countries allowing similar patents. Seeds, which were once open and bread in many universities or by individual communities of farmers, were now a totally for-profit capitalistic institution.
Monsanto is evil. They go after farmers who have their crops infected by Monsanto products due to basic wind and cross-pollination. Once a judge rules the seeds have patented DNA, farmers have to dump all their collected seed supply.
You are spewing the official garbage line nonsense. It has nothing to do with science or the safety of GMO (which is an entirely different issue). It has to do with something that was once commons and community now being closed and for-profit for no damn good reason or benefit.
Why? Developing new biological technology is no different than developing other kinds of technology. It's difficult, expensive, and if you don't give the people that put in the effort and money to do it then it will never get done in the first place.
There's plenty of other entities that would be interested even without patents. Large agribusiness would be interested in increasing yields (your 'bigger banana'). Health organisations would be interested in dietary components (your 'vitamin A deficiency'), and it's not like research universities are forbidden from doing agricultural research.
In all seriousness, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should be careful about exactly what sorts of advances in biotech should be patentable. There is a legitimate debate to be had about how big the change should have to be to gain protection because obviously all new work is based on the past work of others (and mother nature herself).
But I don't think that admitting that we should be careful about where we draw the line means that we should have no line at all. There is legitimate biotech work that people are doing. Hard work. Expensive work. Good work. If we want this work to happen, then it makes sense to put in some sort of legal protection for it.
In the Monsato case, the patent covers every instance of those genes, whether they came from Monsanto or not.
Here's an article on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks:
So... you're saying that crossbreeding of plants and animals did not exist before corporations and patent law? That's just utter, utter, utter nonsense.
So now that you're saying that patents should only be for difficult things that takes years of education to do, why did you bother to talk about copyright above? You can write trash and it's covered by copyright. Plenty of trash is covered by copyright, stuff that didn't require education, discipline, or talent.
Copyright and patents are meant to protect novel things; how difficult they are to achieve is not really relevant, so sneering at 'that's just a bigger banana' is just elitism.
To be honest the whole thing was ill-conceived on every level anyway, but corporations and patent law alone were enough to doom it.
Perhaps the facilitation of some research should be a function of the government vs. a for-profit endeavor.
There is a balance to reach, and I think e.g. Monsanto has reached out quite nicely. For instance, both by law and contract, subsistence farmers may use even licensed breeds. You don't have to pay licenses to grow your own food. You only have to pay if you are utilizing the IPR commercially.
Same is with medicine: new medicines help curing people of diseases.
Your argument resembles a requirement for farmers to work for free because everyone needs food so it's wrong to charge money for it.
Monsanto existing is a net positive given how long traditional techniques would take. It is being closed and made for profit because it takes millions of dollars worth of investment to make these improvements. There should be incentive to do this.
They do not.
Before we move on to all the other arguments against Monsanto, we should probably dispose of that one.
That's one idea. Another idea is that genetically modified seeds should be just as patentable as anything else.
I'm willing to consider arguments in favour of either position, but you haven't really put forth an argument in favour of yours.
> That's one idea. Another idea is that genetically modified seeds should be just as patentable as anything else.
Those two statements are not incompatible, and I would agree with the resulting conclusion.
They don't. They go after farmers that intentionally selectivily breed those "infected" seeds. The defendents never tried to argue that it was just accidental cross-pollination.
All of that can be true without stopping "Monsanto is Evil" from being accurate.
I feel this is also a very short-sighted comment to make. These groups are a symptom of a problem that the industry(ies) create. The fact that they slow development in certain areas are a result of malpractice on the corporate level driving people to hold certain opinions.
Calling them "evil" is just as misguided as calling Monsanto "evil".
Don't forget - their seed contaminated his pure strain. Why shouldn't he benefit from their sloppiness? Is he supposed to suffer the contamination and not, at least, gain from the traits of the new strain?
They also manufactured the infamous "agent orange" during the vietnam war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
From the article that you linked:
Additionally "Boehringer, which used the relatively safer low-temperature-process since 1957, in the same year warned the other producers of 2,4,5-TCP, which were using the high-temperature-process, pointing out the risk[vague] and providing suggestions how to avoid them."[28]
Internal memoranda revealed that Monsanto (a major manufacturer of 2,4,5-T) had informed the U.S. government in 1952 that its 2,4,5-T was contaminated.[29] In the manufacture of 2,4,5-T, accidental overheating of the reaction mixture easily causes the product to condense into the toxic self-condensation product TCDD. At the time, precautions were not taken against this unintended side reaction, which also caused the Seveso disaster in Italy in 1976.
The employment of 2,4,5-T by the military rapidly ended, according to the American Cancer Society, following the convincing results of a study in 1970 that found 2,4,5-T could cause birth defects in lab animals.[30]
So yeah, Monsanto warned the US government of the problem 10 years before the start of Operation Ranch Hand, and they were ignored. And I can't really fault a chemical company for manufacturing chemicals when the DOD orders them.
Why not?
If you don't believe in patenting plants, fine. But please don't try to convince people by telling them that Monsanto sues poor, hapless farmers for things they can't control, which is what your summary implies.
Yeah, they are probably as ruthless as anyone else in seeking profit but they are not. No one has forced the farmers to use their seeds. Farmers are opting for it willingly.
I find Tesla motors far more evil that uses Tax payer's money to subsidize rich people's car that does not even run 300 miles.
Monsanto or not, every seed breed developer has right to protect their IPR.
watch the 10min Documentary, "Seeding Fear", Michael White Vs Monsanto [0] by Neil Young [1]
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZGueeao0tE
[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/see-neil-youngs-monsa...
It's really very simple; if you don't uphold their ability to defend their intellectual property you destroy the business model, and you'll lose the research.
The US Government needs to step in here -- exactly the same as they would if Chinese companies were selling computers with pirated copies of Windows into US stores.
That would clearly be in violation of international law. The same stands here.
The farmers agreed to the license at the start. It's over. They don't get to pick and choose.
It's not Monsanto's job alone to defend international law.
There is not international law. Sure there are treaties, as you said, but Argentina produces a ton of food. If the U.S. does anything to darastic it will starve or at least decemate the economy.
Point being, the U.S. can do very little. Argentina has to be willing to uphold those treaties on its own or it will lose business (which is the incentive to uphold those treaties).
The US is a net food exporter to the tune of thirty million tons per year. If Argentina decided not to sell food to the US it would have no effect whatsoever.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-pla...
Put $1-2 million together, knock out the terminator genes, profit. How are you going to sue? The plant is no longer they same biological entity Monsanto rights apply to.
Small farmers could never fund that sort of effort, and large industrialized farms would be sophisticated enough and have access to legal counsel to know better.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_plant_breeding#Gree...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_for_the_Pr...
A lot of seeds are actually hybrids which don't breed true. You plant two varieties in the same field, detassel one, and use the seed next year as your hybrid crop. You cross (say) a big growing breed with a fast growing breed, and because the two parent strains were uniform, the children will be uniformly big and fast growing, but the grandchildren won't.
This is why most farmers nowadays prefer to buy their seed corn: it's better but a pain to produce (anyone here have a summer job detasseling corn?). I'm curious if the pirated Monsanto breeds have third generation degeneration.
Argentina is ignoring their obligation to support intellectual property rights, which they have agreed to in hundreds of trade agreements.
Monsanto isn't "hiring private police", they are threatening shipping companies who aren't performing their due diligence to assure they aren't transporting illegal goods.
It's funny that you act like Monsanto is the legal enforcement entity here and the Argentina government are the lawbreakers. But hey, even if you weren't spouting corporate B.S., the right thing for Monsanto to do is to use the legal avenues available to them to hold the government accountable - not coerce private companies into doing their bidding.
International shipping companies are subject to international law. Monsanto is threatening them with international law. That is fully within their bounds.
Argentina is operating outside of the international laws and norms here, and should reap the consequences.
http://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-polic...
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"If you don't like Monsanto's work, don't pirate it. "
Their (plant)-technology infiltrates the environment around, so at the end of the day, all farmers are using some kind of monsatos tech (unwanted).
Should they pay, because monsatos IP is spreading like a wildfire?
no offense & best regards
The claims about farmers inadvertently using Monsanto seeds are rubbish. If some seeds would spread like wildfire, that would be a different thing. But they don't. The farmers using Monsanto (and any other licensed) seeds are doing it on purpose.
The most commonly cited claim here is Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, and you should read it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
Okay. Let's try that for awhile and if that doesn't work we can go back to acting as if companies are saving the world every day and if just us stupid constituents would acknowledge that everything would be awesome.
In reality, they know these are so nice seeds that they want to use them.
The article does not say which legal basis Monsanto claims to have - can anyone shed some light on this?
This sounds a lot like the music industry and their constant call for "royalties".