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Comment by david_b | Hacker News Reader

We're talking about a company more aggressive and protective of its patents than Apple or any tech company anyone has ever seen before. Not that I condone Monsantos actions, but they kinda have to be: their inventions replicate quite freely, lowering the bar on infringement to entirely new levels (basically to infringe you have to do what your standard-issue caveman was already capable of...) - it raises the question of how to finance crop research when you can only take money for the first generation of seeds you sell.

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IANAL. What worries me about this is that by changing a line of DNA in a 1G seed, 2G seeds (and beyond) fall under their patent. ie, they own the entire seed, and more importantly they own all the offspring of the 1G seed.

Isn't this the same concept as saying you replace a part in your vehicle/phone/pc/whatever with something that is patented, and now the patent covers the entire vehicle/phone/pc/whatever?

Alternatively you patent a commodity (seed/raw material/synthetic material/etc), now everything that is made from that commodity is covered by the original patent? what happens when you use the commodity to make a tool, with which you build other end products? where does this end?

Maybe I am misunderstanding, or have the wrong end of the stick?

There is at least some merit to the idea that the pollinated field is manufacturing the patented invention without a license.

(Which just points back to discussing the merits of granting such patents)

There is some merit there. However, it is no different than getting a patent on some protocol that sends bytes in an IP packet, and suing people who own routers for patent infringement, because those routers are copying the packet on reading it from the wire, and sending out a copy of the originally transmitted signal. This is arguably manufacturing a patented product too. So is any IDS that copies the packet to a buffer to do analysis on the stream.

"That's ridiculous!" a bunch of you are saying right now. You're right, because that's how the IP protocol works. Things get copied around, it's built into the basic underlying technology process you are utilizing. Yet, how is a plant producing pollen and sharing it's genes around with nearby neighbors not part of the underlying biological process the engineered genes are using?

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