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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

>locked in a legal battle with a company that claims exclusive rights over the variety of white nectarine he grows.

>[...] Fruit patents are becoming more common

this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.

If you spent decades doing selective breeding to obtain a more desirable product, you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product from you and made money off of your hard work.

If the products are being bred from tax funded programs, then yes, anybody should have access to the new breeds, but if it's privately funded, then why should it be available for everyone? Without the protection, there isn't much incentive to invest time into developing better foods.

But you can't just take a seed and make a new plant of same characteristics. Now I'm not sure if that's the case for nectarines but apples mutate massively between seed and plant that made it so basically all plantations are clones or clones + grafts.

You'd have better luck "stealing" it with some wire cutters and cutting some shoots off the trees

> you'd probably be a bit annoyed if others just stole the product

For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes.

> then why should it be available for everyone?

Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.

>you cannot steal genes.

Why not? You can steal bits, unless you think copyright law's bunk as well. You can even steal ideas (patents).

You can steal neither of those. You can copy them and in some specific cases copying bits or letters or some other human creative work might be unethical, in a lot more cases it can be illegal, but it is not theft.

The basic purpose of patents is to make it worthwhile to develop something new and valuable. They are unnatural - but useful. Working backwards, if we want people to spend time and money developing new breeds of plants, you arrive at these kinds of rules.

If someone grows a new tree from seeds after buying your fruit, their trees will take several years to bear fruit right? Works almost like a patent anyway.

(I don't know fruit growing well so maybe that's not true)

You could graft a young tree to a mature one to decrease the time to market.

Again, not an expert, but I believe you need to graft a cutting from a tree that already bears fruit onto rootstock. Only the inventor of the new seed variety would have a fruiting tree.

You graft a bit from a small tree, to a much more mature rootstock, so the time to market is a lot of less than trying to grow a small tree from start. So like 1-2 years instead of 10+ years. Yes, you still need to get the scion from someone that has them because apples don't breed true, the only true one is the original that all the others are grafted off of.

Plant patents incentivize the creation of disease resistant, tasty, and hardy varieties. If you remove the patents, you remove the incentive for private capital.

Capital to create new plants has to come from somewhere: public tax funding, grower-funded pools, or patent licensing. We do a mix of all three.

Farmers already have plenty of incentive for hardy and resistant varieties. People already have plenty of incentive for tasty varieties.

You don’t need patents. The single biggest technology driver has been maths. And it doesn’t have patents.

Patents stifle innovation.

This isnt even a patent case. Its a contracts case. The article says these trees arent under patent, the farmer signed a contract saying he would only sell to one supplier and now wants to sell to others.

...and none does. You can grow and sell any peach you want; the tree has no sense of the childish tantrums of the state over its bounty.

This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.

> ..and none does.

Monsanto begs to differ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.

Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission.

All this silliness to create a huge complicated regime to pretend that these things are "property" in the same sense as your underwear is just so obviously childish, incoherent, and inconsistent with reality.

It's just a really elaborate gown purported to be worn by the manifestly naked emperor.

>Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission.

So you're against any sort of intellectual property?

Current IP rights are overly stringent and ones designed to protect IP actively detract from progress.

> So you're against any sort of intellectual property?

I observe that the universe in which I live doesn't seem to include the concept of intellectual property, and that there is quite a lot of misery and confusion that arises from efforts to shoehorn it in.

> this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.

Wait until you hear about Monsanto/Bayer - a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.

>a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.

The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_li...

>The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits.

This, the people that don't understand farming and buy into weird anti-gmo propaganda always claim that a simple google search agrees with them, but when you actually read the cases, it's clear that the people being sued are always in the wrong.

This is so simplistic.

They made a new varietal. Nobody is saying he can't plant any of the standard heirloom Nectarines. The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it.

Honestly, how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? This is how it has worked for half a century and mild gripes aside, the quality of the produce in stores is WAY WAY BETTER than it was before (seriously, what is the last time you ate a Red Delicious apple?)

Have like... some awareness of the large functioning important system you are mindlessly breaking with throwaway comments.

> how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all?

How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public?

Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them

Well, yes. That's what is happening. The contest is called "market" and "the people" reward competitors by paying them.

Patents are used to enforce the rules so that competitors don't cheat.

Selective breeding requires sometimes _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work. This is not a good fit for academia and even worse fit for government programs.

> _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work

Sounds like it's ripe for AI automation. Need less of this nonsense about restricting access because "effort should be rewarded with exclusivity".

How do you propose to use AI to grow fruit trees faster?

Not grow faster, but to reduce the R&D effort in increasing yield quality and quantity, similar to what this guy[0] did in his garage. And to directly optimize the production itself, like automatically managing FarmBots[1] at the family and community level. Entire plant food pipeline becomes essentially free, and similar can be done re animal food as well.

[0] https://twitter.com/DouglasYaoDY/status/2070904914050797582 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48706690

[1] https://farm.bot/

profit share, royalties, etc. many ways to structure economic benefit

That... was exactly the deal he had and didn't like.

> Under the agreements, Mora was to pay Giumarra a royalty of $2.50 per tree and a 4% production royalty based off the gross sales of the fruit the trees produced, as well as a sales commission.

> The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it.

I've read this a couple of times in these comments. However, this "in a while" is meaningless. A quick search suggests plant patents are 20 years from filing of patent. That's not as bad as I was thinking after hearing about the copyright nonsense of 95 years of publication or 120 years from creation depending. That'd be multiple generations of farmers rather than just one.

Yes, I assumed that was common knowledge. 20 years is pretty reasonable.

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