There is one notable example where a farmer intentionally and willfully planted seeds that he knew were Monsantos, but I'm unaware of any pattern of litigation against farmers for the actual unintentional use of Monsanto seed.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B83aJv4L7U-iYzYyMzQxOTktZjY5...
Before this case, I believed the "Food Inc." claims about Monsanto being lawsuit-happy. Now I'm angry that it really appears to be the organic farmers who are manipulating the public.
The closest is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis... but in that case the facts as found by the court of original jurisdiction were that the farmer selected for Roundup Ready plants that had been accidentally cross-pollinated (in exactly the same way I did this sort of thing with E. Coli in some molecular genetics research long ago), saved the seeds from those plants, and used them to plant 1,000 acres (4 km^2).
Per the judge per Wikipedia, "'none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality' ultimately present in Schmeiser's 1998 crop." Wikipedia also says in the summary "Regarding his 1998 crop, Schmeiser did not put forward any defence of accidental contamination."
They approached him to sign a license, the two parties couldn't come to an agreement, they took it to court.
I don't see this as a valid example of the claim. I also don't see what Monsanto could possibly hope to accomplish at net by suing good faith cross-pollination instances (yeah, they might scare more farmers into buying their seeds, but they'd get slapped down by things like that class action suit others have mentioned with failed due to standing, that is, no examples of this).
We worry about a lot of things in computer science that has never happened and may never happen. There's common discussion several times a year on HN about the ethical rights of artificial intelligence or lab-grown brains. It's still important to worry about things that haven't happened and may never happen, if only to ensure that they really do never happen.
It's completely plausible that a company could sue over this farmer's fear. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't happen, or that we shouldn't worry about it.
If the financial hit from the bad press is outweighed by the financial gain from whatever is causing that bad press, which do you think a company would pick?
At any rate, I think you and I are in violent agreement and aren't actually disagreeing, so we'll leave it at semantics.
Please don't use hypotheticals to rationalize a bias if you're not going to also consider the entire set of all possibility.
You don't get to just say "they could be evil; therefore they are evil". That's absurd. They could be good, too.
1. They are known to be aggressive in courts.
2. They are simply promising not to sue for cross-pollination.
3. They have been caught lying before.
This last one is regarding a herbicide called Roundup, where Monsanto lied to European farmers about its toxicity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)#Legal_cases). I used it and feel bad about it because I try to keep the surroundings healthy (I dont have any crops though). So if they say "Oh yeah its fine we're not gonna sue you don't worry" it makes me feel sceptical.
The seeds weren't Monsanto's seed. They were harvested crops. It would be more fair to say that Bowman probably knew or had reason to suspect that a large portion of those "junk" seeds were likely descendant of Monsanto's patented herbicide resistant seed, and that he had probably signed a contract previously in which he agreed not to save seeds from his harvest for further planting.
On the other hand, GM crops are patentable, whereas hybridized crops are not (is this correct?). This is the heart of the economic argument: Farmers can buy the seed or not. But they can't produce it themselves. So the tools and techniques aren't irrelevant.
It's certainly _possible_ to have it both ways (as we do now), but this way of parsing the issue seems to me neither economically nor technologically (in the sense of patentability) advantageous to agriculture in the long term. I'd prefer not to get into a situation where the only economically sensible way to produce food is to buy seed from one source. And that's the rational choice for a company like Monsanto: increase shareholder value by becoming the only economical source of seed.
"Whoever invents or discovers and asexually reproduces any distinct and new variety of plant, including cultivated sports, mutants, hybrids, and newly found seedlings, other than a tuber propagated plant or a plant found in an uncultivated state, may obtain a patent therefor..."
See lots more e.g. here: http://cookingupastory.com/patent-law-how-patents-grew-over-...