Software is only eating the world because we let it. When they're done eating what makes our lunch and lunch box money, then the robot tractors will turn to eat us.
What makes you think the breeds they're developing are "better"? Monsanto famously developed "terminator seeds" that were only stopped from distribution under intense pressure from the community since they posed a major risk to the food supply[0]. The seeds were genetically designed to die after one harvest and Monsanto couldn't guarantee that the terminator variants wouldn't cross-pollinate with legacy varieties and inherit the same trait. That is pure greed. Not improvement, not innovation. Pure, unadulterated greed. We have to move past the argument that all businesses are truly innovating all the time. The only thing constantly being innovated is their ability to make money. Take everything else with a grain of salt.
No, the whining about patented plants is because they would be superior, and farmers who spurned them would be at a competitive disadvantage.
You can't have it both ways.
Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted?
Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued. Monsanto has license agreements in place that permit them to sue farmers that use their seeds without permission. This means that if your neighboring farmer uses Monsanto seeds and some of the seeds blow onto your land and cross-pollinate, you're now violating Monsanto's patents. They've sued farmers for millions over this[0].
> Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted?
Like I said, Monsanto couldn't prove that terminator seeds wouldn't cross-pollinate with other varieties, which could've triggered a mass-starvation event unlike anything we've ever seen. It's crazy to see people defending this kind of behavior.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
If you buy seed from another supplier, Monsanto would sue you? It's incredible you could make this statement without realizing how completely and obviously absurd it is. If this scenario were real, other seed producers could have demolished Monsanto with restraint of trade lawsuits, and would have.
And no, Monsanto never sued a single farmer due to inadvertent contamination from GMO pollen. They stated they never would, and it's very likely that even if they had tried, it would not have worked (since the farmer is not responsible for the contamination.) They DID sue a farmer who deliberately sprayed a field that had been contaminated, to kill off the crops without the trait, and repeated this until he had selected for and concentrated the resistance trait. THAT act, spraying and collecting, showed malicious intent and violated the patent. It's not something an honest farmer would have to worry about.
If terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) caused traces of cross pollination, why would that be a problem? The trait would rapidly select itself out of a population.
"You there! Crop! Stop sharing genes! Stop adapting to your environment! This piece of paper says you can't!"
The idea that you can loose a reproducing organism on the world and then sue people when that organism does what reproducing organisms do is just... stop and listen to yourself. You're spouting nonsense syllables that resemble speech.
If Monsanto's little wet dream does come to pass, I imagine you'll defend things like "Sorry, but Monsanto says you haven't paid your kidney licensing fees, we're going to have to take that transplant back" or "Looks here like you owe us money because one of your ancestors bought some genes from us".
You'll probably say that can't happen for some reason or another, but unless we push back forcefully now, it will. Once you've thrown reason in the trash, all that's left is greed.
So what? How is this relevant? The crucial aspect is captured by the analogy: accidental copyright infringement is by and large not possible to prosecute, but deliberate infringement by pretending an accident is. Nobody lost a lawsuit to Monsanto just because their crops accidentally shared some genes with Monsanto plants.
> If Monsanto's little wet dream does come to pass, I imagine you'll defend things like
Are you able to maintain some minimal standards of politeness and charity in public discussions? First “spouting nonsense syllables that resemble speech”, now you’re creating a blatant straw man. Is this how you normally talk to people? Maybe I should pick a random organization that I’ll impute you are a fan of, invent some atrocious “wet dream” of it, and pretend that you defend that atrocity. How about that?
I'm also not inherently anti-Monsanto. You're the one that brought up a scenario where they were acting like cartoon villians. Maybe that should make you pause and think. If you're involved with Monsanto in some way, perhaps you could take some initiative to discourage them from acts of cartoon villiany?
> Maybe I should pick a random organization that I’ll impute you are a fan of
If you are "a fan of" any organization such as Monsanto, you should reconsider that choice. Monsanto won't love you back.
EDIT: I'm not really sure why you brought up being a fan of anything, not clear how that was relevant in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dude, what? I’m not a fan of Monsanto, what are you talking about? Do you know what the word “impute” means?
I think you need to step back from the keyboard, as apparently your emotions are clouding your judgement, reason and politeness. Maybe get some help.
Monsanto can get fucked, the idea of patenting nature is so obviously absurd on the face of it that I must assume you were not in your right mind while writing this comment.
The fact remains. Farmers who don't knowingly plant patented seeds have nothing to worry about. The fact that the vast majority use the patented seeds means the seeds are worth more than they cost and the seed researchers are creating value.
Living creatures are compositions of matter, full stop. Patent law applies to them just as it does to any other compositions of matter. There's nothing ethically problematic about this either.
Perhaps (and I am guessing) your problem is that patenting living things is slapping you in the face with the proposition that living things, including yourself, are just arrangements of atoms, and the feeling of dismay at that has transmuted itself into resentful attack on the messenger.
Stating "There's nothing ethically problematic about this either" doesn't fix the inherent unethical ramifications of trying to force the imaginary concept of "ownership" onto natural processes. I'm sorry that this is not obvious to you, but I hope that some day you can sit down and reflect why you don't understand that.
I think the burden of proof is on strong IP advocates here. Prove to me that innovation would be stifled if plant patents were not allowed. Because all I see is a massive centralization of that innovation into the hands of a few gatekeepers that get to own the results.
In general, anything GMOs are going to be used for are things you can't reach by ordinary selection. Otherwise, that approach would have been used.
They choose not to because Monsanto famously sues the hell out of farmers who have patented seeds in up in their farms.
Though this may accelerate development, the real question is whether the cost is worth it.
I don't get it. Humans have selectively bred better plants for millenia before the era of modern IP. A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? This is ideology, not economics. There are plenty of institutions that would work on improving crops even if Monsanto & co. got out of the game. Universities come to mind here. And the results of their work could actually help farmers that can't afford IP-encumbered crops, not just large, wealthy farmers.
If you are fine with the process being much slower than now, why do you care about 20 years of patent protection? If you’re willing to wait centuries for improvements the modern corporations achieve in years, why not just consider the patent protection period to be extra part of the process? It’s still faster than the millennia you talk about, no?
If that's actually the alternative (and I don't think it is), then yes. Patenting DNA should not be allowed.
In the current conditions, I agree that an open-source supplier is a though proposition. "The invisible hand" is working on a time scale too short to allow self-regulation, thus the playing field would have to be leveled politically, maybe by changing the IP laws to benefit the people more. Unfortunately, a nation of vehement lawyers is very unlikely to allow this.
The cross-section of "willing to pay full price for a brand new farm implement" and "cares enough to get a slower/less featureful device for open-source" is very small. If the open tractor was better and cheaper than the Deere, it'd win even without being open, and if it is not then it has a hard row to hoe.
Construction equipment went down this path long ago, I've heard that Cat will basically give you machines for free as long as you sign up for the service/maintenance contract ...
0: https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...
when you buy a car, you can either pay full price for a feature, lets say heated seats for $4000, or you can purchase subscription for $80/mo, or you may opt out of that feature, save money and it will be disabled programmatically in your car. Just as if car was never supplied with heating element for seats.
yet your car will still be shipped with heated seats - just because it is cheaper to do that for manufacturing purposes. Cheaper to equip all cars with the standard heated seats, than manufacture two model of seats: with and without heating.
plus you can always subscribe for that feature any day post purchase, so there is no downside for manufacturer. you get what you pay for.
you can always pay upfront for the feature and will never have to pay subscription
Without these, it's debatable how much innovation would occur in crops/plants.
Also your comment does not make sense. Some plants are can self-pollinate and are sufficiently inbred so that they 'replicate' themselves. Many plants are out-crossers. There also exists apomixis, asexual reproduction etc. Plant are also well suited to clonal propagation.
'Natural' is a completely vague term. Many of of the crops we have bred and that are IP protected (soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton, rice) have effectively 0% chance of occurring 'naturally' in nature because they conditions for their fitness to be high enough likely would never exist.
I never argued that they were patenting wild plants. But bred plants existed long before they could be patented. Indeed, Monsanto did not start with "wild" strains, but with strains developed over millenia of selective breeding. Plant patents are a form of "enclosure", where a domain that was previously freely available to the public (plant breeding) becomes commercialized and monetized so only a few entities can realistically improve on plant strains without risking a lawsuit. How this benefits innovation in the broad sense is beyond me. But it's certainly good for biotech companies' bottom line.
I enjoy the debate around plant breeding, and there are issues with IP and how that IP is protected/enforced/interpreted. No different than many other industries. It would be difficult to adequately argue that IP in the ag sector has been not been net beneficial for most players (companies, consumers, farmers, etc.).
I would argue they've simply been outcompeted. The market has spoken in many cases. You can still buy non-IP seed, easily. But because there is no-IP, its hard to recoup money and reinvest it thus they stagnate.
They are. E.g. Monsanto didn't invent the glyphosate-resistance gene for their Roundup Ready GM crops. The gene was already present in nature, and Monsanto merely copied it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready#Genetic_engineer...
My understanding is that the Clean Air Act now largely requires manufacturers to ensure consumers can't modify the software to run if it fails emissions checks, but I haven't researched the law myself.