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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

This is one area where I commonly see farmers with this worry being told "yeah but that has never happened!"

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.

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It's also equally and totally plasuible that Monsanto will never sue another farmer, ever, for any reason.

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.

I don't think it's "completely" plausible, e.g. look at how much bad press they're getting for unfounded claims of this.

Bad press doesn't mean everything. Microsoft still reaps profits from undisclosed Linux patents from suits against Android handset makers (although they promised not to sue Linux developers in a previous deal with Novell). Monster Cable still sues small companies for using the word Monster, even though they get a ton of bad press for 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?

Which is why I focused on the sweeping claim of "completely", which is similar to the word "everything".

"Completely", sure. That's too much. "Completely plausible", on the other hand, means something else altogether. Completely plausible means it could conceivably happen. It's entirely within the realm of possibility. Not saying it will happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

At any rate, I think you and I are in violent agreement and aren't actually disagreeing, so we'll leave it at semantics.

It is reasonable to expect a contingency plan. Is there any evidence of people using PRISM-style web scraping to influence politics in their favor? Not really, but that hardly means I trust the status quo.

anybody can sue anybody for anything. it doesn't mean they'll win.

The strategy isn't about winning. It's about taking people to court that can't afford it. They can lose a case but if the farmer lost the property over legal fees, that's a win. Swoop in and buy it cheap, sell it to someone at profit to farm with their products with tighter contracts to boot.

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