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> 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.

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."

> fails to meet up with the reality that plants have plantable seeds.

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.

Its more akin to a company using torrent as their distribution platform, requiring a licensing fee to re-seed the content, and then suing someone for re-seeding or torrenting the file they originally seeded.

No, it's akin to someone paying to license software for a year and then continuing to intentionally use it after the contract has expired.

Farmers almost never grow seed crop. You're making generalizations about an industry you don't know much about.

No, its not. From the original comment in this thread

>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.

From the link:

>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.

It's a terrible argument that one should be able to copyright a plant's genome.

No one can patent a plant's genome.

Patents (and copyrights) are on new genetic stacks, because the development, testing, and field trials put into it involves resources (costs).

> 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.

The USPTO exists to protect investments into intellectual property and help ensure economic costs of development are distributed amongst it's users.

If you're going to generalize patents and copyrights as just "a business having costs" then you're grossly oversimplifying it.

> The USPTO exists to protect investments into intellectual property and help ensure economic costs of development are distributed amongst it's users

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."

That's why the roundup ready tech patent expired in 2015. IP creators are given a set timeframe to recooperate costs.

You can now replant your roundup ready seeds, toomuchtodo, as much as you want.

A few patents down, 4k-6k more to go.

>Or I wait long enough for an intelligent majority of Congress to invalidate the ability to patent or copyright seeds.

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

Tech always wins in the end, and all old men die eventually.

That argument hinges more on copyright than patents, though. A patent on something like Roundup-resistant seeds lasts twenty years. A copyright can last well over a hundred years.

And here I thought the guaranteed monopoly period of a patent -- in order to recover development costs -- was the business' reward for public disclosure of the technology.

Should there be any limits to patents? If not, why not? Because the US government has said so? And that's enforced by privately negotiated treaty with other countries, without the consent of their citizens?

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.

> Because the US government has said so?

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.

Sigh? Sigh. You do realize that while law is a social construct, representatives are under no obligation to enact the will of the people, right? And Congress has notoriously low approval ratings? And that only when shamed into taking action they do so? Right.

> 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).

This is a nitpick, but Coke has many different flavor compounds that are part of the formula, while most medicines contain a single active molecule.

A widespread arms race of decoys and analytical countermeasures is still bad, of course.

Argentina has a democratically elected government. How can you say that the government's treaty agreements were made without the consent of their citizens?

If the artificial gene insert was designed so that it doesn't propogate to the next generation (which is theoretically possible), would you consider this more fair? That is to say, Monsanto wouldn't have to impose any 'artificial rules' because their plant crops are designed to last a single generation.

Interesting question. To be honest, I'm not sure, but I'll be considering it this evening over a beer.

This has been done by breeders for years; no need for any "biotech" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid

Well, in Argentina there are not patents for plants at all (genetically modified or not) if they can reproduce themselves. And for what its worth, Software Patents do not exist in Argentina either.

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.

Then it appears that Argentinian law is in conflict with treaties that the Argentinian government has voluntarily entered into.

Well, most of those treaties are about defending IP, which is possible through other methods.

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.

>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.

It isn't just a mater of terminology. Plant breeder's rights are different from patents and generally give much less power to the rightsholder. For example, the US has them via the Plant Variety Protection Act, but they only give protection to one single variety of plant, they allow researchers to use that variety without having to get a license, and they permit farmers to replant saved seeds. For this reason, US agribusinesses invested a lot of legal resources in convincing the courts to let them take out normal utility patents on plants, which had previously been considered unpatentable. (Plant patents were not the same thing, no matter what Monsanto's propaganda department have been claiming.)

> Is Microsoft to blame for Windows piracy

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.

It is my understanding that copyright and patents exist exactly to create artificial scarcity so that the owners can extract money. I'm not sure whether it's a good idea, but it seems to work reasonably well for what it was designed to do.

> work reasonably well for what it was designed to do

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.

Just because the cost to copy IP today is near nothing doesn't mean that there are not fixed costs into the generation of IP.

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).

So who is the owner of nature? Is it for complete animal kingdom or are we just a co-operating organism in the whole environment. Making arguments on ownership would be too grave against humanity.

We went down the dark road of licensing restrictions on farmers almost 90 years ago.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930.

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 .

Plant patents didn't cover crops that had to be replanted annually, so the only licensing restriction they imposed on farmers was that they had to get certain varieties of fruit trees and other similar plants from approved breeders (and honestly, I don't think most of them were even that expensive). In 2006 a company did begin using its plant patents on a variety of apple called SweeTango to force farmers to agree to a restrictive contract that forces them to only sell their produce through the apples through them and pay ongoing royalties, but that practice was previously unheard of.

How exactly is Monsanto supposed to recoupe the initial investment of generating a transgenic crop and getting it through the FDA to ensure its safe for human consumption if they can only charge for the first generation of seeds. The second generation still contains their unnatural transgene insert (the part which is actually under patent).

In corn at least, hybrid vigor usually means the 2nd generation crop isn't very good and farmers almost always buy new seed every year. This isn't true for all crops, but for corn, buying new seed was common long before GMOs.

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.

This is the correct reason - this has been going on since at least Norman Borlaug's work (the Green Revolution), you can't just keep on seeding your seeds you bought, the seed company has to keep on recreating hybrids.

There's a lot of misinformation in this thread, as usual on this topic.

They could have made seeds sterile.

Licensing restrictions are 100% optional: Nobody is forcing anyone else to plant, say, roundup ready soybeans. It just happens that the seeds that require licensing are that much better than the alternative, an overwhelming majority of farmers plant GMO soybeans. If, say, going organic is more profitable, farmers plant organic crops instead. Farming is a low margin business, nobody is putting a gun to their head one way or the other. If licenses were draconian and not worth it, the farmers would not buy that seed. It's not as if there are compatibility problems if they don't plant what everyone else does!

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.

>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.

> Also within the current regulatory environment, where it costs >$100MM to deregulate a GMO any other business model will be flawed.

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?

Do you think that books should be copyrightable? Software? Movies? Any sort of digital good?