Hacker News Reader

Comment by Androsynth | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. They patented a scientific process, which is what patents were originally designed for. This is a case where patents are actually not disgusting. (If I am misinterpreting the patent, please let me know)

Should chemists have not been allowed to patent the Haber Process? That is a chemical reaction. If chemical reactions are occuring all around us, isnt it disgusting to be able to patent it? No, because patenting a scientific process is a (the?) legitimate patent use case.

pull to refresh is a disgusting patent. Any of the patents mentioned recently by Samsung or Apple are disgusting. This isn't.

View on HN

They patented a scientific process

It seems they've patented the result of a process, not the process itself. The seeds the farmer bought are patented.

Exactly this! See my comment made above (or below) pertaining to their patent on pigs/hogs.

You aren't seeing the distinction between a patented process for producing roundup ready seed and a patent on the lifeform and all of it's descendants in perpetuity.

The owner of the Haber Process patent has no say in what the ammonia gets used for after they have sold said ammonia. Nor should they.

This case is a bit different than the Haber process because these seeds are used to produce organisms that manufacture more of the seeds. If you are patenting the process to manufacture this type of GM soybean seed, won't it cover any process that is used to manufacture these seeds, including plants in a field? It is a tricky issue, and I don't know what the precedent is.

However, if they did patent the organism itself, or the result of the process (as e40 said in a sibling comment), then I am against this type patent.

Personally, I think IP law should be small and narrowly defined. I think that patents are valid when it is a scientific (ie non-trivial) process that has a limited duration.

EDIT: After thinking about it, I think the distinction comes down to this: are they selling it? if so they have no ownership rights on the next generation of seeds. Are they licensing it? If so, yes they do have ownership of the next generation of seeds. In that case, they are licensing to you a manufacturing process where you are allowed to sell the output, but you do not own the process itself.

Yeah, the analogy to the Haber process, like most analogies, falls apart pretty quickly.

I like that distinction between selling and licensing. It clears things up a bit and also exposes the ridiculous/terrifying consequences of being able to license lifeforms.

We're certainly not far away from modification of humans, at least in small ways, so we better have it figured out by then. If you, through some patented process, gave your children some genes for disease resistance the legal framework in place for agriculture would have the preposterous effect of giving patent holders control over how they were allowed to reproduce. Bit of hyperbolic example surely, but still an instructive one IMO.

No, they abused their knowledge of how seeds work in order to rent-seek on a process that worked just fine for untold hundreds of thousands of years without Monsanto.

But the process I assume you're referring to (farmers saving seeds) has changed, and just in the past 50-75 years. Now farms are massive monocultures and are susceptible to pests so they require pesticide resistent crops.

Whether you think that's a good thing or not is another story. Or maybe you think farmers should be able to save GMO seeds. I won't argue with you there, but the process of farming most definitely has changed, and it's not the same as it was thousands of years go.

"Rent seeking" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. Rent seeking means to try and extract rents from a process that would have happened without you. Rent seeking would be if the farmer had, through traditional agricultural processes, come up with a seed that had glyophosphate resistance, and Monsanto had sued him on the theory that they owned the patent to glyophosphate resistant seeds.

But that's not what happened. Without Monsanto, the glyophosphate resistant seeds in question would not exist. The farmer in question was free to use regular old soybean seeds and get regular old soybeans. Nobody forced him to use Monsanto's seeds--he did so because he got a benefit from them, a benefit that was the result of Monsanto's invention and its investment in R&D.

> Rent seeking means to try and extract rents from a process that would have happened without you.

So, we agree it seems.

Seeds -> procreation -> more seeds.

You missed the bit about splitting legal hairs. I know that lawyers love to do just that but this is food we're talking about, not words on paper.

Monsanto is trying to profit from a process that goes:

[special seeds + special herbicide] -> procreation -> [special seeds + special herbicide]

Which would otherwise be:

seeds -> procreation -> more seeds.

Nobody forced him to use Monsanto's seeds

It's not so black-and-white as this. You can typically buy excess seeds from the local grain elevator for replanting; these now contain an unseperable proportion of the descendants of Monsanto's seeds, so it's at least become lot harder not to use any of them.

In other cases (not this one), the farmer's field has been cross-contaminated from nearby fields of GMO soy, so they have been forced to use the descendants of Monsanto seed. Are these cases different? Why, in patent law? (Patent infringement does not require intent).

The environment that Monsanto are trying to create is one in which you must pay a royalty to Monsanto if your crop contains any of the descendants of their seeds, and where completely avoiding their seeds is impossible or at least very difficult (and imposes new costs).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com