How “Legal” Are Seed Libraries?
postcarbon.org
postcarbon.org
Honestly reeks of agribusiness lobbying.
Seeds are a fundamental requirment for human existence and should be free to sell, save, use, give away.
Next thing you know water will cost $15.00 a gallon and only be sold through authorized sources like Monsanto and Coca-cola for "QUALITY CONTROL" purposes.
This is actually a good, simple example of a common side effect of regulating many industries. The quality or safety requirements seem reasonable and often just good practice to existing operators. For new operators, especially those doing things differently (like running a free library) it can be a serious hurdle.
Well that's just not true.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-fi...
There is an element omitted, which was that he harvested those seeds (in accordance with his established business practice of keeping seeds from his field) in the knowledge that they were Roundup resistant, since he had sprayed his field with Roundup to see what would happen, and what happened was some of his wheat lived.
Roundup isn't patented or controlled in any way. So what would happen if I took up the hobby of growing a few patches of wheat every year and spraying them with Roundup? Over time, the magic of selection should produce Roundup-resistant wheat, which would be free of any Monsanto influence. Would I be violating Monsanto's IP?
If you think I wouldn't be violating Monsanto's IP by growing, and selecting, my own Roundup-resistant wheat, take note that Schmeiser didn't do anything I didn't describe myself doing in the thought experiment.
>Schmeiser didn't do anything I didn't describe
Yes he did. He didn't develop his own Roundup resistant seeds, he grabbed them from Mansanto plants.
>the magic of selection
It doesn't work like that. What you would end up with is years of nothing but dead plants until you get bored and forget about it.
I don't want to defend Mansanto, but you're being ridiculous. This argument is repeated over and over and it's just not true.
The additional "action" you ascribe to Schmeiser is purely metaphysical. In the thought experiment where I grow wheat as a hobby, I do the following:
1. Purchase, and grow, wheat seeds, not from Monsanto.
2. Spray my wheat with freely-available Roundup.
3. Harvest and replant whatever happens to survive.
4. Purchase additional non-Monsanto wheat in the case where I don't get any seeds in step (3).
There are two things we can say about Schmeiser:
1. Schmeiser took steps 1-3 above.
2. Schmeiser didn't do anything other than steps 1-3 above.
There was reason to believe that they'd work for him faster than they would work for me. But all of his actions were unquestionably above-board. What produced the ruling against him wasn't anything he did -- it was something his neighbor did.
Consider a different scenario. Schmeiser, the eccentric farmer, decides to devote a patch of his land to independently developing Roundup-resistant wheat. He does exactly what I described, seeing little success. Three years later, his neighbor starts purchasing and planting Roundup-ready wheat. Schmeiser continues to do the same thing he's been doing for three years. Is it now illegal?
He had Roundup-ready wheat in his field legally.
He legally sprayed it with Roundup.
He legally collected seeds from his own wheat.
He legally planted seeds that he owned legitimately.
But it all works out to be illegal because he's a bad person? Why would whether it's OK to do something depend on whether you've done it before?
from kevinpet: "The Monsanto patents are for the method of using a particular herbicide in combination with the modified plant seeds.... Has Monsanto ever sued anyone who was not trying to use the combination of the GMO crops and the herbicide they are tolerant to?"
from tptacek: "the behavior Monsanto pursues is planting unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spraying them with glyphosphate-based ("Roundup") herbicides. You can spray Roundup without a patent license. You can probably plant RR crops without a license. But if you do both (commercially, at least), Monsanto sues. The point of RR seeds is that they resist Roundup, which is a broad-spectrum herbicide that will kill non-RR crops. In the commercial suits, it becomes tricky to argue that you planted RR crops unwittingly when you are later shown to have sprayed them with an herbicide that would have certainly ruined your harvest but for inbred RR resistance."
There are a lot of actions that, if we described the component behaviors, would sound legitimate -- but taken in aggregate are clearly wrong. It's legal to be in the forest and it's legal to discharge a firearm, but it becomes illegal if you knowingly target a person in the forest with that firearm. It's legal to change your clothes and wear a fake beard, and normally legal to go into a grocery store, but it becomes illegal if you disguise yourself to circumvent a store ban. And it's legal to have RR seeds in your field and it's legal to spray roundup, but it becomes illegal if you intentionally try to circumvent Monsanto's patents by using roundup to isolate their seeds and then intentionally replant those so that you'll be able to use roundup on your crops without destroying your crops and without paying the standard fee.
This isn't a good example; it's not legal to hit the other person whether you're in the forest or not. If you mean targeting but missing, that's also illegal no matter where you are, but hard to punish without good evidence of malice (again, no matter where you are). There's an element of the offense which is (a) clearly not included under "be in the forest" or "discharge a firearm" (for example, if I was Superman and I just threw a bullet into someone at speed, that would be just as illegal as using a gun to do it), and (b) definitely illegal no matter the context.
> It's legal to change your clothes and wear a fake beard, and normally legal to go into a grocery store, but it becomes illegal if you disguise yourself to circumvent a store ban.
I don't really object to this example, though if the law is as described I object to that. What recourse does the store have? Is disguising yourself actually part of the offense, or is the offense purely that you entered the store?
Though the point is less the examples and more the principle: that an offense can be made up of multiple inoffensive-sounding parts which are only problematic when taken together.
Disguising yourself being an additional, quasi-separate offense puts it into the pattern of hate crimes, where a legal action harshens the penalty for an illegal one. But it doesn't illustrate the idea that an offense can be composed solely of actions which are all individually OK; if you're banned from a store you commit an offense by entering it, and entering in disguise necessarily involves entering.
It's probably worth mentioning blackmail, which is a standard example of a crime made up solely of legal acts. But that very property of blackmail has meant that judges (and some legal theoreticians) hate it and try not to extend what sorts of conduct might be considered blackmail or draw analogies to blackmail when considering other crimes.
it's a big stretch from "I didn't happen to describe any perfectly" to "there aren't any".
> "an offense can be composed solely of actions which are all individually OK"
An offense can be composed of actions which all sound like they're OK when described without the context of the other actions. (See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034 -- changing IPs is OK and accessing a website is OK, but when you've received a C&D letter and you circumvent an IP ban, that's lawsuit-worthy.)
Going back to the Monsanto case, it sounds like it's OK to grow the seeds you happen to have, and it sounds like it's OK to spray your crops with roundup, and it sounds like it's OK to replant seeds that survive. But the combination, clearly intended to acquire a RR crop (and use roundup on it) without paying the appropriate fee, is illegal.
I don't see how this differs from the situation of entering a store while banned (and optionally disguised). It's quite clear that visiting the website was an offense regardless of IP cloaking.
> Craigslist gave the world permission (i.e., “authorization”) to access the public information on its public website. Then, just as Brekka instructed that an “authority” can do, it rescinded that permission for 3Taps. Further access by 3Taps after that rescission was “without authorization.”
> The banned user has to follow only one, clear rule: do not access the website.
The IP ban was considered evidence that the requirement to stay off the website was properly communicated, but the C&D is surely sufficient for that purpose.
(Orin Kerr actually blasts the judge for misunderstanding the law, saying that in his [Kerr's] view accessing the website after receiving a C&D would not in itself be an offense... but the judgment is officially the law, and Orin Kerr isn't.)
Taking this back to the original point about Monsanto: it's not legal to isolate their seeds and then grow them while using roundup, without first paying the fee to have their patented roundup-ready seeds. Because it's illegal to skip the license fee. Several layers of posts back, you described certain farmers' actions in ways that sound legit, but when you take the actions all together they're clearly attempting to use the special properties of Monsanto's seeds without paying, which is illegal.
You can "misleadingly describe" something by leaving information out, as when I describe fatally shooting someone as "discharging a firearm". But that isn't just phrasing something in a way that makes it sound better, that's leaving information out.
In all the examples you've discussed, one of the component actions is a violation on its own; it's not possible to decompose them into actions which are actually innocuous (as opposed to "phrased to sound innocuous"). There is an element of illegality which remains present as you decompose the offense. That isn't true for the case of spraying your legally-obtained Roundup-ready wheat with Roundup.
It appears to me that the reasoning here goes "if we do the obvious thing, a patent on Roundup-ready wheat will be worthless, and so therefore we need to contort the legal system until such a patent has value". But that isn't even a legal principle; it's quite possible to obtain various privileges through the legal system such that the normal benefits of those privileges cannot be extracted (even if I have a trademark on White (tm) brand paper, I can't stop other paper vendors from calling theirs white).
The need to contort the legal system is an indication that patents on wheat varieties are a bad idea. At root, this is because wheat has volition of its own; it wants to spread. There is analogous law for animals which makes the owner responsible for what (say) his dog does; if that system were adopted here, the licensed RR-wheat grower would be liable for something like facilitating or contributing to patent infringement.
I've assumed that a situation where a crime can be decomposed into parts that are entirely legal represents an undesirable twisting of the legal system. The closest analogy I know is the crime of blackmail, which is composed of entirely legal actions (if you threaten to do something illegal, it's actually a different crime, extortion). Legal scholarship is divided over blackmail; many people don't think it should be criminal at all precisely because it involves taking only legal actions. This establishes a couple of things: (1) Even if you don't think there's any value in the principle "two non-crimes don't make a crime", a lot of people do, which makes it a very reasonable criticism of a situation that violates it, and (2) crimes of this kind are extremely unusual, which means it's definitely worthy of comment, and requires a little more justification than a typical law.
All of that is basically by way of saying the judgment represents a bad idea, and atypical law. The difficulties involved in giving meaning to a wheat patent suggest that we shouldn't try -- it's the same argument you see against drug and alcohol prohibition, price controls, commanding the tide to recede, etc.
Going back to the original comments, I responded to someone saying that "Monsanto has sued someone for having his neighbor's seeds blown into his field, and won" was untrue. I maintain that the person I responded to was wrong, and his parent was correct, because it is acknowledged by all sides that, if his neighbor's seeds hadn't blown into his field, Schmeiser, taking the same actions he did take, would not have been violating Monsanto's patent. The germination of his neighbor's wheat, over which Schmeiser had no control, transformed his legal action into a crime.
Indeed, much of US law centers around phrases like "knowingly" or "with intent". And if you decompose the offense without leaving something out -- specifically, without leaving out the intent to utilize the special GMO property of Monsanto seeds without paying for Monsanto seeds -- then the element of illegality remains in your description.
It's not "the germination of his neighbor's wheat" that turned Schmeiser's action into a crime; it's his intent to transform his commercial farm from a non-RR to an RR operation by isolating RR seeds rather than paying for RR seeds. The guy you claim was wrong was actually right -- Monsanto didn't sue the guy because his neighbor's seeds blew in; they sued him because he intentionally isolated those seeds in order to use them without paying for their use. Had the seeds not blown in, Schmeiser would have had no reason to take the actions he did -- but it's his actions following the seeds blowing in, not the seeds blowing in itself, that got him sued.
You can argue it's a bad law for other reasons, but the particular approach you're taking is weak.
And if you want to bet your farm on you being the one to magically find Roundup resistant wheat, you go right ahead. But no farmer is going to do that. and Schmeiser certainly didn't.
You want to argue, go argue with the judge who heard all of the facts. But please, don't spread false information like "Monsanto sues farmers for accidents". It's not true.
I don't like Monsanto, but nothing I've read indicates this alone is sufficient to lose a lawsuit. In the case I assume you're referring to, the farmer didn't lose because harvested a few plants that had blown into his field. He lost because he then killed off his non-resistant plants with Roundup, intentionally collected the seeds from the remaining Monsanto plants, and replanted his entire field with them the next year.
http://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/2147/index....
Testing by government regulators is how we knew that the water from Lake Erie was unsafe to drink on Ohio during the algae bloom a few weeks ago, for example.
In new construction (at least for public spaces) a water sample from the plumbing must pass chemical testing by the local government before it can be offered to the public.
Recent comments from Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck imply that the world's water will soon come under the control of corporations like his. Brabeck makes the astonishing claim that water is not a human right, but should be managed by business people and governing bodies. He wants water controlled, privatized, and delegated in a way that sustains the planet.
http://www.naturalnews.com/040026_Nestle_water_supply_domina...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SEF...
And then his attempt at damage control.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
There are rules governing what a waste water treatment plant can output (especially around things like phosphorus). On a river, one town's waste water is the next town's source water.
New York City owns large tracts of land to help protect its water supply:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_syst...
http://www.pwconserve.org/issues/watersheds/newyorkcity/
There are also usually pretty strict laws in force anywhere surface water is used for drinking water (you see watershed signs for that).
Of course new and changing interests will require lots of changes to the way the oversight it done, and it anyway isn't exactly perfect.
If you don't water you lawn, you're fined. If you do, you're fined.
And here's an example of a guy going to jail for having a rainwater pool on their property:
http://www.realfarmacy.com/oregon-man-sent-to-jail-for-catch...
And a state law trumps a Homeowner's Association (it's normally even written into the contract). The Association is liable for attempting to enforce something that violates state law.
> And here's an example of a guy going to jail for having a rainwater pool on their property
Um, IIRC, the details of that case are that the dude actually build enormous reservoirs. We're not talking a couple barrels, we're talking something like 3 ponds.
Privatizing the water supply should be heavily debated and the outcome should be what is best for citizens. No price-gouging, as low as possible price for water, etc.
Right now companies can dump chemicals into many public water sources even in the US because it's their water to use also. Industry and farms are the biggest users of water, normal people need to be protected from their abuse of the worlds finite fresh water supply.
If someone invented a machine that sucked air off the planet at a rate which actually threatened the worlds air supply, then yes, air should be regulated. In fact, it already is to some degree with anti-pollution laws.
Regulation and competition allow companies to exist, make a profit, and help citizens at the same time. Yes, some companies abuse their power but as long as government corruption is kept to a reasonable level then the government can step in and either make the company change (in numerous ways).
There would be a problem if a private company had a private military that was more powerful than the governments military, I think that is the plot of the next Call of Duty game...
This is "bureaucracy gone wild". It was bad before, but now we'd been having these chumps brainstorm Hollywood thriller movie plots for 10 years on how Osama bin Laden might destroy Hawaii's pineapple industry by importing hummingbirds...
And so of course they're paranoid of little old ladies trading tomato seeds at a public library. Nevermind that the amount of seeds transferred/grown in this fashion can only be the tiniest fraction of the seeds blowing around in the wind and germinating naturally... by god their going to save us in true movie action hero fashion. By disallowing seed trading among hobbyist gardeners.
I wonder what if they would one day discover that there are millions of people on internet giving away code which is then being used in most critical infrastructure projects. By their logic, they should ban all open-source projects until they undergo rigorous (and hugely expensive) compliance testing. And cyber-terrorism is a real threat too! So I hope they don't read HN, would not want to give them any ideas...
Seriously, don't give the nanny-state, collectivist, big-gov, we-need-more-regulations crowd any more ammunition or ideas! That crowd of kooks do enough harm on their own, no need to help them.
http://www.saveourseeds.org/en/dossiers/eu-seed-regulation.h... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_Kokopelli
No it's not, especially in this scenario. Anyone who espouses this BS should be removed from their position.
The regulations for selling seeds may be unreasonable, but they are at least understandable.
In practice you lose more over time so it greatly depends on how many you start with. However, you could encode the DNA in another format which effectively means unlimited shelf life assuming you a reasonably close species to work with.
Tissue culture requires tissue that is alive. The live embryo is removed from the seed and placed on sterile media containing nutrients and hormones. The exact composition varies depend on the plant species / cultivar you are working with.
Tissue culture is useful as a last resort for breaking seed dormancy, but if the problem is that the plant tissue inside the seed has died, it will be no help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Force
about trying to solve how to say "dangerous radiation" so people in distant future would understand. Not trivial task at all.
The real issue is you need to encode a lot of data in a stable form for a long time for cheap enough someone would pay for it. Pluss, the cost of actually sequencing 10K+ plants * a few examples so you have some genetic diversity.
Germination rates drop over time. Storing seeds improperly will increase that rate (i.e. even fewer seeds will sprout after a give time). You'll more-or-less always get a few to sprout, but you can't count on getting the vast majority to sprout unless you've stored the seeds properly.
If seeds are stored at high temperatures (room temp or above) in non-airtight containers, they typically have a "half-life" (non exact) of a year or two.
If you store the seeds in an airtight container in the freezer, they'll keep more or less indefinitely. (I'm guessing, but let's say a "half-life" of a decade or so.) There are instances of seeds preserved in permafrost sprouting after tens of thousands of years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed
All of this depends on the type of seed, as well. Take my numbers above with several grains of salt. They're from general experience growing up on a farm, not any definitive source.
Agree with the poster who states this is a case of bureaucracy gone wild. There are reasons the initial laws exist (insure consumers are buying viable seeds and that are the species represented), but hey... give some people a little power and they start finding ways to use it.
I honestly don't think "big agrobusiness" cares about backyard gardens. But I might be wrong.
Sadly, the answer to this question these days is nearly always yes, no matter what you are doing. You are pretty much one overzealous act of selective enforcement away from federal crime. 3 felonies a day and all that yap. Do remember that sensationalist stories aside, its exceedingly unlikely to happen to you. Not that we shouldn't try to fix it, but its not worth worrying about to the point that it alters your daily life with paranoia.