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Comment by davidandgoliath | Hacker News Reader

Missing the RIAA: Same scenario, different product. Though the key difference is Monsanto's evils are !@#$ing with our food supply / chain / system that's happily evolved over thousands of years as they sue farmers into oblivion.

The RIAA is merely making 'big music' less important to the majority of us & shooting themselves in the foot in the process while suing their potential clientbase.

Both very much similar, and I'd happily support neither given the opportunity.

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RIAA isn't even in the same universe. You can certainly debate how many innocent lives Monsanto's,BP,Halliburton and Xe Services have on their concision, but I think it's safe to say that everybody agrees it's greater than zero. I doubt even the most rabid RIAA hater would try to argue that the RIAA had actual blood on their hands. RIAA fucks some bands out of money and use lawsuits to shake down people on dubious legal grounds, that's a far far cry from actually letting people die.

Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a different scale. If the RIAA were even better at taking money from people, people would starve.

Of course, it makes no sense for the RIAA to starve its working musicians, but the ones who have stopped selling above margin?

Except that if the RIAA could/would actually put a musician out of bussiness, that musician could do another line of work to earn enough money to eat.

What Monsanto is doing, basically, is redisigning crops to work on their behalf. Whenever a crop can develop properly due to the proliferation of roundup resistant weeds, you have to buy the newest crop from them again, wether you like it or not.

Also there is the (theoretical) risk that someday they won't be able to keep up with resistance, which could curtail food supply, and won't make a difference wether you can purchase it or not.

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