> If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ?
Since when does people have a right to make a profit, even if their business plan is stupid?
> But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ?
Because if you're not a totally evil bastard, you can still make a massive amount of money by creating a brand that ensures people trust you to always give them the best product?
How many people do you know that buy brand name Ibuprofen, for example, despite the fact that Boots, who found the compound and commercialized it, has not held a patent on it for decades? In fact they sold off their own premium brand (Anadin) a while back and now competes with their former brand with cheap generics that often costs a tenth or less of what Anadin charges for the same chemical compound, and still makes money off it despite competition from dozens of manufacturers.
It's possible some types of research would not pay without artificially jacked up prices like this, sure. Boots certainly would have made less from Ibuprofen without a patent initially.
But if these Monsanto seeds are so effective, then this patent acts as a de-facto tax on a whole range of foods, as unlike Ibuprofen, if they are effective enough to affect competition, "everyone" will need them. If they're not, it doesn't really matter if the R&D hadn't happened.
If it already acts like a tax, we might as well bring it under democratic control, and lose the competition distorting downsides of an artificial monopoly, by using already well established avenues for public funding of research to handle any shortfall in R&D funding from curtailing patent rights.
The agriculture industry is one of the largest recipients of government subsidies in the world as it is - shifting even a small percentage of those subsidies into funding R&D to make advances in seeds available to farmers cheaper would probably pay off.