Monsanto Seed Patent Case Gets U.S. Supreme Court Review
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Two things:
1. Someone will still make money from it. Innovation will still occur.
2. Indeed, the industry will change, to a better and fairer one. Oh woe be to humanity!
Monsanto, you already ended farming as we knew it, and that seemed to work out pretty well for you.
"Tesla's radio will end communication as we know it!"
You're right, we could do this all day.
I agree on Monsanto, I think what we have today was intended from the beginning.
Can't exploit the hole anymore ? Stop whining and adapt.
Your suggestion that there may, in fact, be aspects of Monsanto's invention which make it different from what it replaces does not bear on amalag's original inquiry.
It seems to me that if Monsanto can have a patent on a "unique" seed that at the same time is indistinguishable from a natural one then it can be argued their patent covers the natural one as well. Especially if nature takes its usual course where the natural seed slowly takes on the characteristics of the patented seed due to cross pollination. Which cannot be easily controlled in an open field unless Monsanto wants to crack down on all the insects involved in pollination.
Oh yes, make the wind illegal as well.
Based on articles I've read about Monsanto's behavior in this industry it seems they think they do indeed own the rights to soybean seeds in the US.
If the patent covered the process of creating said seed then I can understand. But I don't agree that one can claim to be unique and generic at the same time. Plus if the resulting seed is indistinguishable from a natural one and the patent was on the seed itself then it would seem that the natural seed is the prior art to counter the patent in the first place.
In your example, a proper comparison would be if the new organ is resistive to aging or whatever other common human failing that would cause one to replace the organ. Therefore, it is not indistinguishable from the natural one. It would indeed have a distinguishable characteristic that makes it different than a natural one. Then you can have the patent on the organ. But don't tell me you own the liver of the child of the parent who received your organ because somehow the characteristics of your special organ was passed down to said child.
But if they did create a new characteristic for that uterus, let's say it's resistive to disease, and that characteristic was passed down to the child. Then they would claim that child owed them money because that child's uterus benefits from the characteristic of the original uterus they provided.
The problem doesn't lay around the idea that Monsanto owns the seed they created. I don't dispute that. The problem is that they claim that they own the rights to anything resulting from that seed forever in the future, including cross pollination. Therefore, they feel fully justified in suing a farmer simply because his neighbor grows his crop from Monsanto seed and bees cross pollinated the crops.
The best defense I've heard against Monsanto is that Monsanto's seeds are contaminating "pure" or "natural" crops of soybeans. Which is probably where the argument that the seeds are indistinguishable from natural ones and resulting foods do not need a label telling the consumer the soybeans involved are genetically modified comes from. In that case Monsanto wants both sides covered to their advantage; ie, the seed is unique enough to allow for patent protection but no different than a natural one so you don't need to be told that it is genetically modified.
No, they would not. Children cannot enter into contracts. Even if you think Monsanto is pure evil, they would not try that.
The best a company could do is contract with the parents to indemnify the company against the actions of the putative child. But patents will expire before the child is capable of entering into contracts anyway.
Therefore, they feel fully justified in suing a farmer simply because his neighbor grows his crop from Monsanto seed and bees cross pollinated the crops.
That's not what the linked article is about.
I understand the linked article is not about cross pollination. But, again, the outcome is the same. The farmer in question did not go out of his way to end up with Monsanto seed, as I understand it, but Monsanto is insisting the farmer owes them money anyway.
It doesn't matter how a farmer ends up with Monsanto seed. If the farmer ends up with the seed, even if they didn't intend to, Monsanto is laying claim to that seed.
That's just wrong.
These seeds are functionally different from ordinary seeds, and Monsanto is claiming patents on any seeds that contain the similar DNA.
Monsanto never sold terminator-seeds. They consciously decided to not do that and instead use contracts and patent law to protect their stuff.
9/10 of the comments on this thread are suggesting that Monsanto should have done the terminator tech, though.
But I would still think it wrong for them to attack farmers who unknowingly end up with their seeds, such as from a granary like in the linked article. They should have to prove the farmer tried to get such seeds through improper channels.
Monsanto responded by pledging not to use terminator seeds. The anti-GMO crowd got exactly what they wanted. [1]
It's churlish for the mob to claim they were bad for wanting to use terminator seeds, and then claim that they don't have protection because they didn't use terminator seeds.
It seems that since Monsanto's seeds are spreading into farmer's fields that did not intend to have them then I would say the fear of the terminator seeds spreading might be valid.
I would think the anti-GMO crowd's point is that they don't want gene spliced seeds at all in the first place.
That said, Monsanto's ability/propensity to sue any farmer who breathes in a bit of their genetically modified plant material needs to be curtailed.
Globally, we currently produce more food than we need. The problems we currently have around starvation and malnutrition appear from my limited research to be centred on distribution, comoditization and other socio-economic factors.
How do biotech crops (current or future) tackle these issues?
In real world, if those 670,000 people can't get enough food to get the basic nutrients, if they won't die from vitamine A deficiency, they will die of something else.
The problem of starvation is of social nature, not technological one. There's plenty of technology to save lots of people in those countries, as they're decades behind.
Remember some "produced food" is fed to other food to make meat. What would you say if vegetarianism was legally required?
That said, it really has no bearing on this discussion. Currently companies do things like destroy perfectly good grains in an effort to prevent the price from dropping due to over-supply. Why? Because it costs money to store, so better to just destroy it. If we come up short later, then it's even more beneficial to the company because the price actually goes up!
That's not even touching the issue of Africa, where most 'aide' that is sent never makes it to the starving people due to political turmoil / warlords / etc.
> The world's second-biggest cause of child mortality, diarrhoea, kills about 1.5 million children every year. Three-quarters of these deaths could be prevented with a simple course of oral rehydration salts (ORS) combined with zinc tablets, at a cost of just US$0.50 per patient.
For years we've[1] struggled to get this live saving cheap stuff to little dying children, and haven't succeeded.
Without any massive change - just a little bit of clever thinking, we use Coca Cola's desire to sell fizzy pop to everyone, and their delivery networks, to help ship ORS.
(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-...)
I agree with you about the "We just need to [...]" school of thought being hopeless.
The popularity of hybrid corn is probably more due to the advantages that come from hybridization rather than any pernicious efforts by the producers. It's not like there are organized efforts to reduce the diversity of the seed stock that is available.
I don't see how human genetic selection is morally inferior to natural selection, nor how human designed genetic recombination is morally inferior to random mutation.
I didn't see anything about kill switches (for the seeds? although sterile fruiting bodies are nothing new to agriculture, and I can see why they might want to engineer this into their seeds now to avoid such occurrences in the future), although I did see stuff about producing newer hardier varieties.
They only want to sue because this one farmer is producing plants based on Monsanto's design patents (the design being based on genetic composition) without obtaining a license; which is exactly what you would expect a patent holder to do, regardless of whether its a large corporation or not.
I'll be interested to see what the Supremes do once they inject themselves.
This is a similar argument to copyright law, which lots of us hackers are familiar with. Open Source software is software that everyone can copy all the time, and it has certainly been productive and innovative. Does that disprove your theory that without protections there will be innovation? (Or is this differnet?)
These particular incentives are warping the IP system out of control. They have huge downsides and now little upside (unless you hit the patent jackpot yourself and are willing to go sleazy).
It need not destroy all incentives to hurt innovation.
But designing and implementing an effective regime for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or biotech crops, is a different proposition. Unlike software or fashion or business, the products here are extremely expensive to develop and almost trivially easy to reproduce. In the case of pharmaceuticals, patent protection pays not only for the physical development of the drug, but also the trials of its efficacy and safety. (Yes, it's not exactly that simple) There have been proposals for replacing the current system in these cases, but none have struck me as effective or practicable.
The patent system is a wholly artificial creation, and as such, can be shaped to our collective whim. We can throw out software patents and business method patents and all other types of patents that destroy innovation while keeping those types that do fulfill their original purpose. We need not get rid of them all.
Although, I seriously doubt biotech is key to survival. It's more likely to encourage, overpopulation, resource depletion, and push us towards monoculture / susceptibleness to catastrophic disease / crop failure.
Why this knee-jerk suspicion of profit? Sure, Monsanto seems to be jerks, but it's not like non-profits never screwed anything up.
Food is key to our survival and it's produced and distributed mostly for-profit - this clearly shouldn't be allowed?
Key-to-our-survival is a very strong leading indicator that the demand curve can get inelastic - giving inordinate bargaining power to private enterprises whose entire charter is to get as much money as possible (which makes sense given a normal elastic demand curve).
Healthcare, Energy, and Food should all be places where regulation prevents extreme arbitrage, or those doing the arbitrage will eventually be the de-facto rule-makers. If you want to live in such a society, fine, but I'd rather not. Note: some say we're already at this point, which is depressing to contemplate.
(BTW, I worked like 6 summers for Monsanto detasseling corn)
The problem is that Monsanto claims to own the rights to all resulting seeds from their original, forever into the future. This includes cross pollination. So they want farmers who never agreed to use their seed in their crops to pay up because nature does its thing and everyone's crop ends up with characteristics of Monsanto's seed.
The solution is for every farmer to pay Monsanto or ban nature.
Then you count how many seeds. There's a trespass charge for each and every one of them. After all, their seeds are their property.
One possible way is to wait until the patent runs out, introduce a new version of the seed with a new patent, force all their farmer customers to start using new seed, wait until that seed spreads naturally, start suing again, rinse and repeat.
Is there any doubt who's side the president is on in this matter?
Heck, you might even be able to plant it near where Monsanto grows their corn for seed and then sue Monsanto.
I think that if it ever came to that, all one would have to do is demonstrate that the gene is now occurring naturally, and they'd have a bonified defense against Monsanto.
As it stand now, though, most of the farmers who went to court with Monsanto were found to be intentially trying to reproduce the technology.
Personally I would go the opposite route and do my best to prevent GM seeds from entering my crop. But that's just me.
Plus, not reading the cases you are referring to, was that it was actually found the farmers were doing this or that Monsanto convinced the court/jury that this is so? Remember that requirements of proof are much different for civil court versus criminal court.
Most of the cases I'm familiar with never got to jury, the farmers were bankrupt before getting that far or the farmers just gave in because it was cheaper to settle. Which I'm sure is as planned.
I don't know if there is a court case where the farmer truly had replanted seed of their own with the technology accidently pollinating it.
Keep in mind too that these court cases are closed, and that Monsanto can be using technology to prove their cases - technology which is not public information.
Well, let's hope that if we ever get to have a Star Trek-like replicator, we won't have to "pirate" food and whatnot by using the replicator.
Think of the children!
Its literally like someone broke into your house, raped and killed your daughter and in defense you knocked them off by smashing their head. Then you are being thrown into jail because you hurt that perpetrator and they go free because only you could technically prove they did the crime.
If you are referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis... then you are eliding the part where "[Schmeiser] had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola."
If there was a situation where Monsanto sued and won against a farmer operating in good faith after accidental contamination, please cite it. Monsanto may be an evil megacorp (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Company#1997_WTVT_news...) but evil is not directly related to their GM work.
The problem with that case is in the definition of operating in good faith. If the farmer did not attempt to cause his crop to be cross pollinated with Monsanto seed then it's not his fault that was the result. He may have known what he was doing and took advantage of the situation, but that's irrelevant. Unless it could be proven that he somehow obtained the seed from outside his crop without going through proper channels then he did nothing wrong. He claimed to have replanted seed from his own crop and I don't see where Monsanto proved otherwise. Again, the case you cite is the citation you are looking for.
Granted, I don't believe that Monsanto purchased the land around his farm with the intent to infect his crop with their seed, but the outcome is the same.
The court gave Monsanto license to claim all crops cross-pollinated with their seed as being property of Monsanto. In this case, the court was wrong.