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Comment by hodwik | Hacker News Reader

If you don't like Monsanto's work, don't pirate it. If you like it, pay the royalties.

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.

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The problem here is that Monsanto had defacto pressured Argentine shipping companies into inspecting cargo and demanding documentation from farmers. Monsanto just doesn't have the right to do that, and Argentina is absolutely right to make that clear. It's the same way record companies don't have the authority to hire private police to break into your home and check if you have pirated mp3's on your computer.

Shipping companies have international legal obligations to make sure they are not transporting illegal wares. This has been settled international law for a hundred years.

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.

Your comment would make a lot more sense if it wasn't the very government that's charged with enforcing these laws that's saying Monsanto isn't following them.

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.

Monsanto is absolutely using legal avenues.

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.

Which International law is it that grants a private corporation inspection rights in sovereign nations?

Well... Ford use to do this to an extent. i.e. They used to inspect employees homes to ensure conditions were met.

http://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-polic...

> you destroy the business model, and you'll lose the research.

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.

Most of the world is already running that experiment, and the answer is clear. Research of this kind doesn't come from there.

Any relation to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hodwik ?

Yes

Anti-Monsanto folks in countries like Argentina aren't complaining about Monsanto preventing farmers there from coming up with alternative technology. They want to use Monsanto's technology, except without paying for it.

Not true at all, the protests against monsanto are entirely based on environmental concerns.

Then why are Argentinian farmers using Monsanto seeds?

In reality, they know these are so nice seeds that they want to use them.

The key issue here is equating a living organism with a patentable technology. That is, in fact, the reality we are now living in, but many people are uncomfortable with that.

The article is about a dispute over when royalties have to be paid. Monsanto expects to be paid every time, farmers are saying only the first generation can have the royalty requirement by law.

By that logic we should let Lenovo purchase one copy of Windows which they then install on every machine they export to the US. Then, not only will customs not help Microsoft shut down the pirating of their OS, but Microsoft won't even be allowed to investigate obvious cases of the pirating themselves.

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.

Monsanto implicitly agreed to Argentine laws when they started operating in that country. They don't get to pick and choose.

Argentina is signatory to both the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which is why Monsanto felt safe importing. Argentina is now going back on these treaties, which is why the Government should be stepping in here.

It's not Monsanto's job alone to defend international law.

> 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).

This is the second time I've read something like this in as many weeks. It's nonsense.

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.

Disputes like this are why companies like Monsanto engineer in terminator genes to make the business model viable.

Can you use CRISPR to remove the terminator genes?

Why would anyone bother, even if such terminator genes were present? Your development costs would far exceed the cost of additional licensing, to say nothing of the eventual lawsuits that you would lose. Even with the licensing costs, the benefits of the modified seeds are significant. That's why farmers started using them in the first place.

Are your costs really that high? This was a Kickstarter I participated in several years ago working on plants that glow in the dark. Total cost was ~$484k.

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.

If you modify Windows, it's still Windows.

Good luck sequencing plants from visual inspection.

I don't think that's the issue, here

I never thought the ship of Theseus discussion would come up in the context of licensing.. Yet here we are!

Well, first off, there are no terminator genes in use. Second, any licensing agreement would naturally prohibit any effort to modify it to remove them. There's no getting around the fact that you'd be willfully violating your agreement by starting from the licensed seeds. And even if you could manage it somehow (which you can't), you'd run right into the same regulatory process that Monsanto has already gone through. It'd be much more than $484k for that process alone, to say nothing of development costs.

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.

No, that's why those companies have PROPOSED terminator genes. There is no commercially available product that actually contains them.

I sit corrected. Instead, the current typical approach is to use cross-breeding to produce seeds that grow well the first generation and don't produce reliable seeds themselves.

That is misleading, as the goal of that cross-breeding is not to produce unreliable seeds, but in order to produce better results. Look up "hybrid vigor" for details on this. Nothing about the cross-breeding is done in order to hinder re-use of the seeds, it's just that naturally non-hybrid seeds are less effective.

As I understand it, the idea is to have two parent lines that when produce the desired traits in heterozygous offspring but not in second-generation offspring. Sort of a Mendelian DRM.

This is incorrect. As I already stated: the cross-breeding is to take advantage of hybrid vigor[1], it is not an effort to intentionally hamper successive generations. This same practice occurs in non-GMO, non-patented plant breeding, and has been done for over a hundred years[2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_plant_breeding#Gree...

It is odd if second-generation seeds wouldn't have to be licensed. Licensing is standard practice with all seeds, GMO or not, and has been for decades. Argentine is a member to UPOV (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants) which seeks to guarantee plant breeders' rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Union_for_the_Pr...

I'm actually curious how that works with Monsanto breeds.

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.

They may defend their intellectual property but cannot force others to do the work for them. I am not aware of any regulation that requires shipping companies to actively inspect their cargo beyond ensuring it is safe to transport.

The article does not say which legal basis Monsanto claims to have - can anyone shed some light on this?

This is not about pirating the technology, it is about the law in Argentina.

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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

If Argentina has such laws, they are breaking treaties that the country has signed.

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...

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