Hacker News Reader

> If your neighbor planted Monsanto seeds and they germinated into your crop, Monsanto sues you for stealing their IP.

The only cases I know of where Monsanto has sued involved farmers who were intentionally growing herbicide resistant crops, in many cases intentionally breeding them to express patented genes.

Can you cite a case where a farmer accidentally grew patented crops and was sued by Monsanto?

In the landmark case you are probably alluding to (Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser), Monsanto Canada sued a farmer both for accidentally growing contaminated crops in 1997, and for using seeds from the contaminated crop in 1998. They dropped the charges regarding the 1997 case mid trial, probably because they wanted to set a clean precedent.

Note that winning the suit over the 1998 crop means they won a de facto ban on saving seed from one harvest to plant the next year -- it is beyond the means of independent farmers to detect contamination, or filter out contaminated seed from their own harvest. In addition to creating an economic burden (farmers must now buy seed), it also means selective breeding of crops is now extremely risky from a legal perspective.

From the Canadian supreme court's judgment:

"Thus a farmer whose field contains seed or plants originating from seed spilled into them, or blown as seed, in swaths from a neighbour's land or even growing from germination by pollen carried into his field from elsewhere by insects, birds, or by the wind, may own the seed or plants on his land even if he did not set about to plant them. He does not, however, own the right to the use of the patented gene, or of the seed or plant containing the patented gene or cell."

Here is a more recent case. Monsanto has sued 850 farmers over seed contamination: http://www.activistpost.com/2013/08/monsanto-can-sue-farmers...

Apparently 700 of them settled out of court, so documentation on that front is thin. On the other hand, the Schmeiser (from above) countersued Monsanto after the above judgement, for (among other things) libel, and monsanto eventually settled out of court.

Monsanto has promised not to sue for < 1% contamination, and the courts bound them to that standard. No one thinks it is feasible for small farmers to keep contamination levels below 1%. (Note x=>y doesnt imply y=>x, but if they aren't going to sue farmers for contamination, why not publicly document that policy instead of this 1% rule?)

Finally, organic farmers are repeatedly suing over contamination (which is at least as financially damaging as Monsanto coming after them), with mixed results.

And yet, when those farmers were asked by a judge to provide an example of Monsanto sueing for accidental contamination, they could provide not a single example of this happening[1]. [1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top...

> If your intellectual property blows through the wind and contaminates your neighbors, you should be liable, not them.

More importantly, seeds should not be considered as intellectual property. In particular, it's ridiculous that you are not allowed to replant seeds from your harvest.

>More importantly, seeds should not be considered as intellectual property

why? Most farmers do not replant their seeds (wouldn't work because the seeds are hybrids). do you oppose patenting lifeforms on principle?

> Most farmers do not replant their seeds

And many do, for seeds where it works.

> do you oppose patenting lifeforms on principle?

I oppose applying patents in a way that violates a "first sale doctrine" kind of thing. That is, once you have sold me seeds, they should be my property, and you should not have a say in how I use them. (Edited to add: Even if, yes, in a certain deliberately technical sense, the DNA in those seeds amounts to "derivative works" or "copies" of the DNA contained in what you sold me.)

If that makes patents on lifeforms worthless, that's fine with me. But no, "no patents on lifeforms" is not the principle I start from.

Arguably, the first sale doctrine should apply. Once you sell pretty much anything except GMO seed and software, you have exhausted your patent rights, and the purchaser now has a right to use your patent, and selling the thing transfers the patent licenses. Since the seed is capable of cross-pollination when used as intended, the patent rights would extend transitively to the pollen, downstream plants, etc.

Wouldn't the most natural liable party be the farmer who bought Monsanto seeds and planted them in a careless manner?

So perhaps Monsanto can sue all these farmers for the increase in crop yield, but they could turn around and sue their neighbor for exposing them to the problem.

No. Monsanto reps went to great lengths to tell their seed buyers that their crops would be safe to spray off-label/illegally. On the regulator end they did what they could to look like they were compliant and then encouraged the farmers to do the spraying that caused this.

In case anyone thinks this is just conspiracy-mongering about "big bad Monsanto", drug companies are routinely smacked for doing roughly the same thing in the form of promoting off-label uses for their drugs (prescribing them for conditions that they're not approved to treat, which is legal for doctors to do but not for drug companies to promote). It's not that any one company is bad, it's that the incentive is just too strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_off-label_promotion_ph...