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Comment by kvb | Hacker News Reader

That's a lot easier when you're not trying to improve edible seeds (soybeans, corn, etc.). Although as I understand it, Monsanto also developed techniques for making the seeds infertile, but got so much pubic backlash that they never deployed the technology. It seems to me that they're in a bit of a bind, where whatever they do will be perceived as "evil" (perhaps due to previous bad behavior on their part).

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This is exactly right. There are two ways that Monsanto can sustain their business. One is technological and the other relies on the courts. Monsanto is called evil, either way, often by people who just get some vague icky feeling about GMOs, even if they understand very little about the business or the technology.

There are two ways that Monsanto can sustain their business. One is technological and the other relies on the courts. Monsanto is called evil, either way, often by people who just get some vague icky feeling about GMOs, even if they understand very little about the business or the technology.

This suggests a third way out: they could change their name.

For a growing number of people, the name "Monsanto" may as well be "Diablo". For better or worse, labels are abstractions for humans to comprehend the world, and they often influence our thinking in ways we don't perceive and can't resist. Just look at how destructive labels have been throughout history.

So if your name means evil, then changing it may be a way out.

This isn't as unrealistic as it sounds. The only reason I'd thought badly of Monsanto was due to the tales of (sometimes exaggerated) horror from the people around me. But if Monsanto does their rebranding with some finesse, and completely abandons their old name, then it wouldn't be as easy for the general public to merely lead each horror story with, "So here's what that company, formerly Monsanto, used to do..."

In fact, they'd likely have to qualify the horror story with "used to do" (as opposed to "currently acts this way") since a new label would force most people to think of them as a new company, whether or not they realize it. "New label = new thing" is practically hardwired into our brain, and the effects reveal themselves when we communicate.

This is interesting. For example, anyone who has seen the Corporation loves to go on and on about Monsanto's industrial chemical business, agent orange, and so on. Which is fine, I guess, but Monsanto doesn't even have a chemical division anymore. It was spun off as Solutia in 1997. So, when we're trying to have a serious conversation about the harms and benefits of GMOs, instead we get a bunch of noise about how Monsanto is evil because of their participation in a business they're no longer in and that has nothing to do with agriculture. Huh?

Otherwise smart people are just blindly angry about GMOs for some reason. It's really disappointing.

Some people are angry about Monsanto's actual behavior, not about the concept of genetically modified organisms.

Like declaring public opinion bankruptcy?

How well did that work for Xfinity?

Or Blackwater, for that matter?

How well did that work for Xfinity?

Well, https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=xfinity

"XFINITY by Comcast"

Changing one's name doesn't work if you merely add to it.

Seems likely then that a lot of people dont like what Monsanto is doing, no matter how they sustain it. Also, its all a matter of degree, and it seems Monsanto goes to extremes, which gets people upset.

I would submit that, first of all, the cases in which Monsanto is seen as having gone to extremes were universally cases in which the farmer willfully violated his contract with the company and then lied about it (all while playing the persecuted small guy to the press). Luckily, the courts didn't buy it. [0]

Second, I have yet to hear a serious argument against the tech that Monsanto is producing. I hear a lot about how they're raping the poor farmers, but, as far as I know, those farmers aren't being forced to do business with Monsanto. I'm pretty sure they've chosen to do business with Monsanto because their seeds produce higher yields at lower prices. That sure seems like a positive to me. I also hear a lot of arguments that are basically various forms of "I think this tech sounds icky."

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

Ha! Universally, my ass.

If you read your own post, you'll see that you claim that every case involves: a) a contract b) a breach of mentioned contract

Yet you seem to reference a case in which there was no contract between Monsanto and the farmer, thus contradicting the aforementioned universal claim a.

Can you explain this seeming paradox? Or are you just abusing the language to paint a pretty picture?

People always hate companies providing capital (monetary or technological) for agriculture. For example, banks that charge interest on farm loans have been vilified through history.

Farmers are sympathetic figures deeply tied into national culture. They use this to their advantage. That's how we have tens of billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies and any company that tries to hold farmers to contracts become the target of populist rage.

The populist notion of the noble yeoman suggests that most people don't know any actual farmers. The contemporary farmer isn't a very sympathetic character.

Careful there. I grew up on a farm and have relatives that are yet farmers and are no more unpleasant than anyone else.

Well I wouldn't go that far. My wife grew up in rural Iowa, in farm country. They're perfectly pleasant people. But politically, there is no winning against them. And that's been the case since forever. Stuff like this: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ has tremendous appeal.

"Real" farmers are giant conglomerates like Conagra. What people think of as farmers though are usually just employees or contractors. And those people are fine. The big agricultural corporations like it when people conflate the two.

I dunno. Where I live, most farms are run by small family-owned corporations. I know many farmers. I also think that giving a corporation essentially market power over growing crops is deeply misguided.

I personally consider them evil for the reasons described at the end of glanifrons's comment.

There is room for debate here, but one certainly does not have to be ignorant to regard Monsanto as "evil".

Ok so it seems you are concerned about an organic farmer whose crops are contaminated by Monsanto's seed, who then loses his 'organic' label and gets sued by Monsanto.

Here's a hypothetical question: Imagine that Monsanto only sued the farmer if his crop was contaminated AND he used Monsanto's Roundup-Ready herbicide (or a generic equivalent that specifically targets Monsanto crops like Roundup does). Also imagine that he could keep the 'organic' label by showing that there was only a small amount of contamination. In this scenario would you still consider Monsanto to be evil?

There is nothing about using Roundup that would make one culpable. Roundup Ready mainly means "able to tolerate tons of glyphosphate without dying." Glyphosphate works in use cases apart from Roundup ready crops. I used it to kill poison ivy in my backyard at one point.

Sadly, you and I are not "Roundup Ready" and don't have any mods to our endocrine system to help us cope with eating it and the additives (surfactants) used to bind it to crops.

If a farmer used Roundup, his crop could not be considered organic.

Ok, but the question remains: If Monsanto's policy was to only sue farmers who have contaminated crops AND who use a herbicide designed to kill everything except Monsanto crops, would you consider Monsanto to be evil?

Could someone link to a lawsuit in which a farmer's crop was contaminated with Monsanto seed without his knowledge and then sued by Monsanto? I hear this enough that I must insist on a citation.

I doubt they can. This is the most commonly cited case [0] but it's pretty clear from the facts that the farmer was not an innocent, unwitting victim. This claim is made in bad faith so often as to make any discussion about Monsanto almost pointless from the start.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...

Wow, that Wikipedia article's history is interesting.

What I can see from a cursory look at the court documents is that the court dismissed on grounds of irrelevance his claim that he neither used roundup nor any similar herbicide on the crop in question.

First, you're begging the question. Second, I think you should reconsider words like "evil" to describe the type of work Monsanto does. You're choosing a pretty emotional word about a mostly banal patent litigation.

I don't think this is banal though.

I get a lot of flack for this in political circles but I think that IP law is a field which has more importance for the future regarding individual rights than, say, abortion. We are talking about IP-based monopolies here over crops, medical tests, and the like, and the scope of these patents is just unprecedented. I don't know what to call those who want such power other than evil.

The Supreme Court has been pretty good recently on these issues, for example overturning patents on recommended results in medical tests (and therefore allowing competing ways of measuring the same thing), greatly restricting uses of secondary patents in medicines and the like. Now they are considering two cases:

1) When you patent a self-replicating technology, is the patent exhausted when the product self-replicates, particularly when the purpose of the patented object is self-replication (patented soybean seeds have the purpose of producing more soybean seeds and that's what they are sold for the purpose of doing). I suppose this would have some implications regarding home rose gardens and the ability to legally share patented clones but aside from emerging transgenic crops the implications are not very heavy.

2) Can a part of the human genome in the abstract be patented? Who owns your genes? I think this must necessarily follow that these can't be patented from Prometheus v. Mayo (decided last year, no IANAL) because that case held that you couldn't patent what the result of a drug test meant. But if this can't be patented, then surely patents on crops are exhausted after first sale.

No, those are just the only two options for Monsanto to guarantee sustained profits without producing further advances. It's not clear that they deserve to continue making money like that. From a macroeconomic perspective of trying to feed the most people for the least money, it's almost certainly better to let Monsanto's inherently self-duplicating (and thus not naturally supply-limited) product do it's thing, let their legal department and genetic DRM research stop wasting money, and have their productive research be directly funded by the government if it looks promising enough.

A "vague icky feeling" like anaphylaxis?

http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2007/12/gmo_...

https://www.signaturemd.com/modern-poison-are-genetically-mo...

Not one person I know who is against GMO foods is uneducated about it - quite the opposite... they aren't interested until they start researching the topic. I couldn't care less until my wife started researching it (due to severe reactions by family members). Before then, the only thing I had against GMO was fishy-tasting tomatoes.

Another problem I have with mass deployment of GMO crops is the reduction of active species. Imagine what a simple blight would do to our food supply. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

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