Cool and all, but there's not a single mention of "hybrid" on the entire page, which means that this is not targeted at the majority of, say, US agriculture.
The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds.
While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example, almond farmers in California are far far more productive than pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard. If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and pecans could replace almonds for many applications.
Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.
There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest.
Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output.
And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money.
Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0].
Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory, not the farming.
Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.
EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us, albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes.
If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.
They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that.
The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts.
Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a horrible comeback when the original comment’s “evidence” is as a YouTube video.
Not all farmers understand the depths of the biology they work with, but some probably do.
Not all programmers understand how their instructions influence the circuits that execute them. That does not validate statements like "programmers don't understand electronics."
Yeah, I don't know why you think farmers are "smart" (taking this meaning to convey that we shouldn't question their practices). If you pump enough water and fertilizer into the already-fertile land you can get things to grow. Wow. If farmers were actually smart they'd start thinking long term on how their practices are destroying their livelihood (draining aquifers, polluting rivers, degrading soil quality) or how their politics are driving future generations from rural US (anti education, anti immigration, anti everything). Credentials: grew up in rural midwest.
It looks easy until you face pests, diseases, soil nutrient deficiencies, drought, unfavourable market conditions leading to losses etc. And it's a low margin business so you need to do everything with maximum efficiency to stay ahead.
A programming analogy: Anyone can write an hello world program in Python after a 10 minute tutorial, but delivering software that you can make a living from is much harder.
> returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
We don’t really do that. If anything, the opposite now that the land yields more value.
Largely we just use the excess to feed animals (ie: 90% energy loss) or ethanol/biodiesel (ie: using land as a 2-3% efficient solar panel, along with lots of inputs).
Something like 75% of US corn goes into the above 2.
I'd totally agree w/ this from the "grow corn and then feed cows with it" standpoint.
This is doubly bad if you're displacing natural grasslands and grassland grazing with this. I.e. plant corn on your previous grasslands and cram the cows into some barn.
This came through HN just recently. Another way to do the same though is to go back to what the big buffalo herds were naturally doing. I.e. let your cows actually "trample and shit on the land" and that's what actually keeps it fertile. Then you harvest the cows for meat while keeping their number stable.
Same with many random islands explorers came across: they'd leave some livestock so when they came back later they'd have some dense and fresh food ready to harvest.
Didn't work so well in Australia. And probably any of the islands most likely.
Iceland actually has some trees. But in that climate they don't grow very tall.
Also, much of Iceland is a desert of lava, glass, and black sand; some other parts are covered with ice. Not many plants can survive in such a landscape, and those which do are usually not trees.
Deforestation in Iceland predates industrialization.
“Deforestation is a major issue that is highly prevalent throughout the world. The country of Iceland has been hit especially hard by this catastrophe. A nation that once had forests covering 40 percent of its countryside began to lose its tree cover, when the Vikings arrived in the 9th century. By the early 20th century, however, this tree cover was reduced to just 0.5 percent. To this day, the government of Iceland is working towards reviving the lost forests and restoring the land, in order to work towards a more sustainable future. This problem relates to the course of Sustainability for the Common Good because it covers the environmental issue of deforestation as well as the solutions that are being put into play to make the land more sustainable”
Then you have a dispute about who owns the 10000s of acres and who to pay for the grazing rights. And who is responsible for maintaining all that range? And can somebody be tried twice for a mistake in their management of open range? Then people with and without badges show up with guns.
I'm not sure I understand. Nowhere did I say anything about actually putting bison back out there in the way the settlers found things when they moved in.
But instead of planting lots of corn and feeding your barn full of cattle with it you can also own that same piece of land and sustainably make grass fed beef. Said beef would keep your soil fertile by trampling and shitting on it.
In addition to this your vet and meds bills will be lower to non existent because you don't get the same disease issues you get in cramped barn quarters.
In the USA, the BLM administers some 18000 permits to farmers and ranchers who pay them grazing fees.[0] Then cattle wander on that range exactly as you propose.
The BLM also employs snipers and gunmen to intimidate ranchers who don't pay the grazing fees. Some ranchers respond with impromptu militias.
Sometimes things escalate to the point that goverment agents kill protesters. Sometimes law enforcement officers get assassinated.
But mostly, cattle graze as you suggest and the BLM collects grazing fees.
One of the goals of regenerative agriculture is to get most of the benefits of fallow land while still using the land.
From that standpoint, the math about "but you get less yield" is a bit of a non sequitur. I'm changing the divisor in the equation, which is usually how bad logic slips into an argument predicated on numbers.
Crops on the field are not yet the harvest; grain in a granary is. Harvesting is a very intense process, because the crops need to be collected in the few days when they are best quality and haven't fallen off. Harvesting often occurs around the clock in the season, using monstrous machines.
The lower the yield per unit area, the longer it takes to harvest all, the more fuel is spent, and the higher the risk to lose a part of the crops due to harvesting them untimely. Lower-density crops are noticeably more expensive as a result.
We are collecting and redistributing grain at a discount and using it for anything we can think of. Highly processed food, grain alcohol, “corn fed beef” which is likely a dietary disaster for humans.
Remember, ethanol in gasoline is predominantly about lifting demand for corn in order to court votes from the upper Midwest. We don’t actually need to use corn for fuel.
You can feed pigs on grain and nuts that fell before or after harvest. Ten pigs are pretty big harvesting machine. Birds as well.
Mark Shepard is claiming about twice the yield per acre of conventional farms. He’s doing this by getting less than half a yield of four+ crops on the same land. The trick to being Mark Shepard is putting enough time and energy into your job to understand a dozen crops instead of hyper specializing in two, as if your neighbors aren’t doing the exact some thing.
Now at the end of the day, we still need some staple crops around. That we can stockpile grain for three years and canned food for 18-36 months helps level out boom and bust cycles in agriculture. Good year? Rent warehouse space. Bad year? Let the warehouse lapse, or do invasive maintenance.
Regenerative agriculture is still a big step down from returning the land to natural ecosystems. Quantifying how big that step is, to the point of being able to pick a point in the pareto curve, is a big political decision. There's definitely a place for a lot lots of regenerative agriculture, but it's one part of a solution.
Indeed. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.
It goes beyond country boundaries. There was an interesting case where China stole I think it was specialized corn to begin producing their own instead of spending large sums by buying the product or IP.
Another interesting case was PepsiCo suing farmers in India over a variety of potato. A few years later, PepsiCo withdrew their suit... only to have a group of farmers continue to press the claim and have the courts rule that PepsiCo couldn't patent a seed.
> The general public does not understand agriculture well,
Nor do farmers, nor do people with opinions on farming.
It's in the economic interest of some to confuse knowledge of farming as an economical activity (i.e. industrial farming) from the biological activity. I fully agree GMOs and such get an undeserved bad name, but Big Agri deserves way more of that bad name than they are getting. Farmers are their Amazon warehouse workforce, not trained to understand anything, but to execute protocols to the letter, or else. These companies are planning for the next few years, whereas good farming would be planning for the rest of the farmers life and their children's too.
Big Agri farming is utterly unsustainable because it knows it won't have to pay those bills. When we make them, things will change.
They're also a huge pain in the ass to produce, at least in my experience.
Producing hybrid corn seeds, for instance, is done by planting the two varieties in the same field, with one combine-width of rows of variety A alternating with rows of variety B. Then you need to wait until variety A is grown and ready to tassel, and de-tassel it before those tassels fully form and release the pollen that drifts onto the corn silk. This is usually done by hand, by a bunch of people walking through the field and cutting the stalk between the ears and the tassels.
Once that is done, your variety A ears will be pollinated by variety B pollen, and all of those kernels will be hybrid. But your variety B ears be purebred B, not hybrid, so you now you need to harvest the field while keeping the two sets separate. This step isn't too bad, if you did a good job planting, you just need to first harvest the combine-wide strips of hybrid corn before going back to get the B corn.
But yeah, you're looking at a lot of extra work -- and money, you need contract labor to detassel a field in the narrow window of opportunity -- to produce a hybrid seed for better yields next year, and most farmers don't find it a good use of time, which is why most farmers were buying most of their seed well before seed patents and GMO were a thing.
I used to hear about "detasseling corn" as an utterly miserable short-term summer job option for high school students. Walking through cornfields in heavy clothes (to avoid getting cut up by the leaves) in summer in Iowa.
Miserable indeed! I was in Southern MN and did this job for a few weeks in the summer. We started around 5:30am and worked 8-10 hrs per day, rain or shine.
Why do this? At the time (early 2000s) it was an extremely well-paying, unskilled job at $15/hr!
Also, if you miss a couple of plants while de-tasseling it can be very bad. You must also sign contracts with your neighbors where they will refrain from planting the same crop (in exchange for $). Additionally, to get the best yield they usually place beehives to enhance pollination.
I watch Laura Farms on the YouTubes and she goes into great depth on growing seedcorn as her family’s farm does it under contract.
The de-tasseling is mostly automated these days with a sprayer attachment chopping off the tops and the legions of kids coming behind to get the ones missed.
Then they come along with another specialized attachment to ‘destroy’ the males. Basically just chop them up and leave in the rows which later on gets eaten by the cows. The outside border rows of males gets harvested and turned into winter feed for the cows.
Eventually the remaining corn gets harvested by a crew hired by the seed company because they want the full heads of corn to do their evil deeds to.
> But pure glyphosate isn’t sprayed on crops, Roundup is, which contains a variety of adjuvants and surfactants meant to help the glyphosate penetrate into tissues. And indeed when the study was repeated with what’s actually sprayed on GMO crops, there were toxic and hormonal effects even at doses smaller than the 1 or 2% concentration that’s used out on the fields.
> Roundup was found to be 100 times more toxic than glyphosate itself. Moreover, Roundup turned out to be among the most toxic pesticide they tested.
At this point any time someone switches from talking about Roundup to glyphosate, they either have an agenda, or they picked up their argument from people who do. Some of the 'inactive' ingredients in Roundup are more toxic than glyphosate, and stick around longer. Spraying it directly on yourself, the glyphosate may or may not be your immediate concern, but touching something that was sprayed weeks ago the glyphosate is the least of your problems, so making it an argument about glyphosate is one you can kind of win.
It's very much like the tobacco lobby playbook. Nicotine may not be that bad for you (unless you're a bug) but you aren't smoking nicotine. You're smoking a broadleaf plant exposed to soil minerals and four kinds of pesticides and antifungal compounds (fungi and human livers are susceptible to many of the same chemicals) which may or may not have prevented fungal volatiles from ending up in your lungs alongside the trace amounts of uranium.
You know, I wonder if GMO technology has advanced enough to replace hybridization.
Hybrids give you two different chromosomes, uniformly in your population. You take population AA and aa and get Aa. The next generation you're back to a mix of AA/Aa/aa.
There's no reason -- in the abstract -- you couldn't duplicate your gene and put two copies of it on the same chromosome, one A and one a, so that you can skip the hybridization. But does that work with current technology? I don't know!
But then the GMO company patents the result, and it's not legal for a farmer to do what farmers have been doing for ten thousand years: save some of the seeds from the crop and plant them the next year, or give some to a neighboring farmer. Getting out of that trap is a prime motivation for "open source seeds" projects.
Aside from, you know, the vast uptake of hybrid seeds, which couldn't be saved for reuse either.
Anyway, why exactly is this tradition so important that it would swamp the social benefits from improved plants obtained from GMOs (and such benefits must exist, or else farmers would not use these seeds)? This sounds like reflexive conservatism, wanting an old thing just because it is old, and damning changes just because they are changes.
> save some of the seeds from the crop and plant them the next year, or give some to a neighboring farmer
That hasn't been the predominant practice for the majority of farms for coming up on a century. Cross pollinated hybrid seeds are just way too productive to justify growing your own open pollinated varieties.
That was the promise, and the fear, around GMO, but it really hasn't had that much of an effect. Biologically, the point editing allowed by generic modification, even with our enhanced skills from CRISPR/Cas9, only allows small changes.
Generic modification by molecular techniques is just another tool, that does not supercede or override any of the past forms of generic modification by breeding that humans have been doing ever since we were humans.
Hybrids aren't stable genetics. You cross two S1 parents and get an F1 hybrid with inconsistent traits but hybrid vigor. What would the point be in owning ip of a hybrid? Sure you can select a good one and propagate it and have copies of that one, but then you lose hybrid vigor because they're clones. Ossi is for breeders not farmers.
> which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
I don't think this happens often in practice. Improvements in efficiency often have the paradoxical effect of increasing resource utilization. This is known as Jevons Paradox [0], and it's been observed in many real world situations.
>The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs.
This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point.
They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*) roundup.
The "objectors are ignorant anti science types" with the subtle mislead renders it an extraordinarily effective talking point.
I don't understand, is the talking point what you quotes from me, or their taking point about GMOs?
Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.
There is a little evidence (10.1186/s12940-021-00729-8) that a very particular form of non-Hodjkins lymphoma is associated with glyphospate exposure (occupationally!), but ultimately... it's hard to say.
There's evidence of genotoxicity in human cell lines (10.1007/s13205-018-1464-z), but at possibly an unrealistic dose of glyphosphate-based herbicides. They are also demonstrably endocrine disruptors (10.1016/j.tox.2009.06.006), though again true in vivo exposure levels to glyphosphate is not well established it seems, so these studies are ultimately novel.
However, it's clear that they should be given more care than they are now. Hell, it took me like.. two months? to get a pesticide applicator certification and now I can roundup the hell out of anyone's crops, and I barely know anything about the stuff.
> Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
There are three problems:
- the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at the stranglehold large corporations have over politics - Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying their employees so much they have to apply for food stamps, and local politicians or unions are unable to do anything against it because Walmart can at any time decide to just close shop and leave an area completely without access to groceries (made possible in the first place because Walmart systematically undercut local stores on pricing). And people (i.e. voters) would not blame Walmart, but local politicians and unions. No one wants to add yet another mega-corporation to depend on for survival.
- second, concentration of genomics. When everyone and their dog sans a couple eco activists and seedbanks raises the same variety of crop or the same breed of farm animal, pandemics have an incredibly easy game. The best warning sign what can happen in such monocultural environments are forests (where bark beetles and other pests run rampant and completely destroy them) or bananas (Gros Michel famously got wiped out by a fungus and Cavendish is at the cliff from another fungus).
- third, the impact of pesticides as a whole. No matter what kind of pesticide, they all have serious side effects - most notably, they cause bees to die and as a result, all plants depending on bees for pollination can't reproduce any more. And ffs it's not just bees. All kinds of insects suffer, just compare your windshield after driving a car in the 90s and today through a rural area. And all these insects were part of the food chain for larger animals... leading to an ever growing loss of biodiversity further up the chain.
> But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.
We don't need to go back that far in time. Like half the food produced is wasted instead of reaching a human's mouth - spoiled, rejected for missing quality benchmarks, never sold because stores require an overabundance of choice for the consumer, wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews... the list of causes for food waste is immense. Cut down on food waste, produce less food in total, and maybe avoid the need for intensive agriculture in the first place.
> the most obvious, concentration of market power.
The solution to concentrated market power is not to abandon the productivity gains, but to use law and regulate to de-concentrate market power. We could instead ban specialization and the productivity it brings, but that's dealing with the wrong thing.
> concentration of genomics
Again, solved not by banning specialization, but rather through diversification of the market. Which also helps the market be less concentrated, and further improves productivity. "Free" markets used to mean those that were unconcentrated and allowed easy entry and competition, but rally bad market-fundamentalism ideology has twisted the meaning, and invited reactionary thinking that "markets in general are bad," which is just as wrong as the market fundamentalist approach of "markets must always be used and always are right." Markets are merely a tool that can be used for good or for bad by societies, and markets are socially constructed by law and tradition, both of which are changeable, as is other parts of society.
> pesticides
This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag tech.
> food waste,
This is a rounding error in comparison to the increase in ag productivity that we have created. Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
> This has nothing to do with advancing knowledge and specialization, and in fact reducing pesticide usage is only going to be enabled through greater advancement of our ag tech.
Or by restructuring how land is used. When you have miles upon miles of corn fields, it's a fucking buffet for corn pests. In contrast, land that has a great variety of usages - corn, wheat, grass for making hay, marijuana, rice, potatoes, berries, tomatoes - makes it difficult for pests to explosively sweep over entire swaths of land and leaving nothing but total destruction in its wake. Our ancestors knew this and changed sequentially what seeds they sowed, they even let land sit idle for a season or two so it could recuperate nutrients. All of this is extensively documented, a lot of it has actual scientific backing, it just takes a bit more effort so it isn't worth it under capitalism.
Also, California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for the Saudis to feed cows with it. That is a waste of water and land that could both be used for something more productive than blood money from oil returning home. And they're not the only ones doing atrocious wastes of all kind of valuable resources.
> Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
Well... France for example forces supermarkets to provide leftover food instead of trashing it. That led to a massive increase in food that ended up in people's mouths via food banks, over 10.000 tonnes a year in fact[1], additionally it creates a negative incentive against overstocking.
Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes (which might also have side effects to improve public health, aka obesity epidemic).
Stores could be forced to do regular maintenance on their cooler systems to reduce the amount of food lost there.
Students could get education on how to cook, how to check if food is still edible and other food aspects. It's not like their parents are teaching them...
tl;dr: stopping food waste can be tackled on so many levels and, given 50% food waste ratios, even slashing half of that is equal to provide 25% more food to the world's population.
> California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for the Saudis to feed cows with it.
Dairy is like the auto industry: every state seems to think it needs to have its own protected domestic industry, but it's far from a strategic industry when every nation ends up with excess capacity.
Canada, an excellent environment for dairy production, kneecaps itself in this industry. Could be an export juggernaut, but instead, NZ is the biggest dairy product exporter. 20th dairy producer in the world despite being a top6 barley/oat/wheat/hay producer.
You can’t reasonably expect farming families to be able to afford all the specialized equipment to be able to willy-nilly change the crops they grow and large corporations are just going to specialize based on economy of scale.
When all you need is a water buffalo and a shitton of labor you can diversify crops all you want but if you have to compete in a low-margin mechanized market you do whatever it takes to keep the farm going even if that means diversity gets thrown out the window in favor of cash crops.
Correct. Rubber meeting the road comment here. This is the reality of most farms in America. Possibilities are not "endless" for revolutionizing farm practices, they must be profitable and margins are tight.
>> wasted because restaurants prefer to deliver too large portions because they are afraid of bad Google/Yelp/... reviews...
Not everybody eats restaurant food for entertainment. Sometimes you can't cook and a larger portion means leftovers and usually more calories per dollar.
There's nothing wrong with large portions. If you didn't want that much food, go to a different restaurant, or a buffet where you can select exactly how much food you want.
And what large portions are we talking about anyway? That peaked in the 90s just like your bug splattered windshields.
> But the hybrid practice seem antithetical to open source agriculture.
I disagree, open source ag is completely compatible with hybridization. And if open source couldn't somehow deal with the benefits of hybridization, then open source ag is not a route we should follow.
Farming is a transformation of inputs into food. It's not about seeds and propagating seeds every season... that's just an attachment to a practice like being super attached to, say FTP as the only way to transfer files and deploy a website.
Open Source Ag is completely compatible with maintaining two strains, crossing them, and then distributing those seeds. Having widely distributed access to these seeds, and information about them, gives the chance for more innovation in the crossing, too. The question is whether somebody can get compensated for the efforts in discovery...
It's not fundamentally incompatible, but non-proprietary hybrids are extremely rare. The effort to maintain the two parents and do the cross is much greater than that of saving seed from an open-pollinated variety, so very few growers will undertake that even given the chance. Even if multiple growers do, the smaller population of plants in each of the pure lines increases the chance of significant divergence between sites, at which point the multiple production sites implicitly become multiple different varieties.
Anyone interested here might also wish to read Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties". She's a Harvard-trained geneticist and amateur vegetable breeder, with special interest in open-pollinated varieties derived from proprietary F1 hybrids. Her book extensively discusses the underlying biology, the practical breeding process, and the legal situation of such work.
'hybrid vigor' is when you take two inbred genetic lines and cross them together to pick up some of the genes you accidentally deleted while selecting for something else.
For instance the modern Irish Wolfhound was created by an nobleman who, worried about the breed dying out (there hadn't been a wolf in GB in over a hundred years), bought every wolfhound he could get his hands on, and crossbred them with mastiffs and Danes to build up a healthier population (while maintaining stature). Then he selected back to phenotype and went from there.
One of the groups trying to save the American Chestnut is doing the same thing, though I think their methods are recklessly optimistic. They've crossed residual chestnut populations with Asian chestnuts and then back breeding those to try to get just the blight genes and nothing else.
I say reckless because the smartest thing to do would be to identify the resistant genes and test each tree to see if it's carrying the gene. Instead they are infecting every tree and culling the ones that are susceptible. Effectively making a petri dish in which the blight can learn to infect resistant trees over time.
In some ways I think the GMO people may be the less insane of the two, and I'm very much not a fan of the transgenic surface area for pathogen adaptation across species.
Fixed water requirements from tree crop farming in states where water is a concern is the dumbest agri business ever. Tbh most of America's farming sucks, bulk corporate welfare keeps most of it propped up and is used to buffer against the efficiency of global markets and y'all do some incredibly dumb stuff like but farms in water restricted areas.
Lol nearly all your beefs feedlot... You do well to feed the masses, but the countries process of getting there is like it's stuck in 1950s. Lol go watch some of ya broadacre boys and they still monocrop tilling thousands of acres by throwing fertilizer at it. Bumpkin stuff, hardly advanced.
And if you could do it better you wouldn't be here throwing shade about stuff you only barely understand, you'd be out in a field somewhere dunking on the local farmer's co-op. If you think modern ag is a bunch of ass-backward hicks then explain why some comment section hero hasn't already revolutionized the business. We'll wait.
I remember, there was a case where a farmer grew patented plants on his field. They spread to his neighbours field who then got sued by the patent holding company for not licensing that plant. My memory is a bit fuzzy here but you get the idea.
Now, how about reversing that? Think of a GPL-like licensed plant that makes all derived plants also inheriting that license. Legally poisoning the binary distribution format DNA of all inferred works. Wait a few decades and, with a little bit of evolutionary luck, wake up in a Stallman garden.
I'm just a naive dude with no clue about genetics or even law. Just a thought that came to my mind :^)
No, he got sued by the patent holding company for using those seeds and then spraying them with Roundup, which would have killed off his crop had they not been the patented seeds. This is true of all the cases of people being sued for cultivating "Roundup-Ready" crops: the story they want to tell is that they were sued for cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on their fields, but the facts established at trial were that, however the seeds ended up there, the farmers deliberately exploited the patented system.
God forbid the farmers benefit for free in some way from the unpredictable and uncontrollable pollination of a plant genetically engineered to be a highly successful cultivar.
I'm not attacking you here, but the logic decided by the courts may be lawful but it is not moral (in my opinion). It's as if a noisy neighbour hosts a late night party and you happen to enjoy the music. The neighbour notices and decides to charge you for the streaming fee.
This argument is completely orthogonal to the narrative originally presented, which is that farmers who weren't trying to benefit from the patents at all were tangled up in Monsanto lawsuits. That narrative is false, and that's all I'm here to correct. There's a Motte and Bailey thing that happens with these discussions, the bailey being "Monsanto will sue you even if their seeds just happen to blow onto your property" and the motte being "intellectual property isn't real".
That seems utterly irrelevant. Trying to benefit is irrelevant. Trying to steal is what is relevant.
Consider the case where the gene edited crops actually implemented a dependency on roundup, and the neighboring farms were forced to use round up rather than did so because it was simply more useful.
No such dependency exists. The only rational reason to spray a crop with RoundUp is that you know you've sowed RoundUp Ready seeds; in any other circumstance you'd simply be killing your crop off. If you contrive a counterfactual where that's not the case, then obviously different fact patterns matter. It's like saying "well, sure, he shot the guy, but consider an alternate universe where shooting someone with a gun doesn't hurt them but instead immediately brings them to their recommended daily allowance of thiamine".
The claim that Monsanto sues people for accidentally or unwillingly having their patented seeds sown is simply false, full stop.
That is still irrelevant. You should not be able to sue someone for having your stuff. You should be able to sue them for stealing it. In this case it was not stolen. It was planted and spread naturally. And then the farmers chose to keep using the things that things that had basically fallen into their laps.
I really don't care if you think all patents are bogus. That is the most boring conceivable debate to have. There is nothing special about seeds to change the argument; that's all I'm here to say.
What's special about seeds is they reproduce with a bit of water, soil, and sunlight. My laptop does not and in fact will be very sad if I water it. Thus no matter how many patents Intel has on the things inside my laptop, there's a limit on how much I can ultimately do with the physical device.
Wouldn't this actually be an argument in favor of seed patents? I've been more or less a complete IP abolitionist for so long now that thinking in IP maxi terms is basically a foreign language to me now, but wouldn't they make the argument that it's necessary to allow protections where the good is A. hard to develop initially and B. easy to reproduce?
Nothing you can do with water, soil, and sunlight is going to produce RoundUp --- or a RoundUp-Ready seed.
It's perfectly reasonable to oppose all patents. Just don't pretend the wind, sun, and dirt somehow invalidate seed patents. There's no distinction to draw.
That's a whopper of a non sequitur. I was asking about the specific patent on these potatoes. Our ancestors have been growing this specific patented version of potatoes for thousands of years? Really?
No, they have been cross pollinating parents with desirable traits to produce an offspring with more desirable traits. The same thing Pepsi did to make FC5 potato.
Read it carefully because while the patent claims that it also would apply if transgenic modifications are added, the variety was developed through just classic breeding techniques, which are described in the patent in case you aren’t familiar.
And it's fine to patent specific (and novel) varieties of potato. The patent just applies to that specific variety, not to the general concept of improving potatoes. It's irrelevant that other specific varieties may have been bred for millenia.
Farmer here, the above is absolutely correct. The notion that a farmer would "take a chance" on spraying an non-GMO planted crop with Roundup/Liberty is a pure fiction.
It seems perfectly reasonable to most people that even if you own a patent on a seed that if I obtain it and can grow it I should be able to, in the way that your rights are generally exhausted if you sell a patented part to retail.
Monsanto would lose nothing in case where it was accidental and where the farmer intended it Monsanto would benefit from selling roundup.
Because of this, no plausible damages to Monsanto and that doing nothing is a perfect solution, the lawsuits seem egregious.
It just has nothing to do with what we're talking about. The notion that Monsanto is suing farmers for seeds just blowing onto their fields false, and thus can't have anything to do with whether seeds should be patentable.
slow down and understand my words. it's perfectly fine and moral to take advantage of the fact that someone else's seeds have blown onto your land, but that's not an argument you can sell to a court. so publicly making a separate legally stronger argument is normal and reasonable behaviour that doesn't lessen them whatsoever
the logic decided by the courts may be lawful but it is not moral (in my opinion).
Doubly so when you consider that the patent holding company (like Monsanto) has a lot of ability to affect legislation and the (presumably) independent farmer has next to none. The issues here are systemic and not limited to big ag.
That patents genes spread lightly onto his field didn't give him a "get out of patent free card" to then concentrate those genes by spraying the field with herbicide. The courts properly understood that intent and actions matter here. The farmer was in the wrong and justice was done.
It just demonstrates how patents are a form of rent seeking. You own the product of your labor but you should not be able to assume you own the accidental products that are related to your labor (ex. buying tools from a tool smith which then you use to make your own tool smithy).
In no way was that depiction accurate. Indeed, if an innocent farmer were, by no fault of his own, found liable for contamination, he could properly sue the others for contaminating his land. For this reason, Monsanto always said it would never sue just for accidental contamination, and never did.
What if the farmer was trying to clear the land with roundup and the accidental gmo modified crops prevented him from doing so. Could he sue for damages?
How does the doctrine of first sale not apply here?
I could make up some convoluted argument but… the neighbor conducted the first sale so this should have extinguished any further patent claim. Of course, IANAL.
He is not reselling individual seeds. He is manufacturing new seeds. He is not allowed to do that, and particularly not allowed to do that with intent.
>A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.
In this, letting the plant reproduce arguably falls under "making" (ie. manufacture) of the patented thing (the genetically modified plant).
It's perfectly clear it was a correct legal decision. The farmer was deliberately and intentionally trying to evade the patent, as we've explained multiple times in these comments.
Perhaps you could explain why the decision was incorrect? Or why justice demanded differently?
The ability to patent life itself is a dangerous one.
Imagine where these precedents lead when inevitably we start genetically engineering people. If you yourself carry genes engineered by a biotech firm (cancer resistance or laser eye beams, you can pick according to whim), do you have to pay them royalties when you have children?
Even without patents, there's a whole system of plant breeder's rights. The idea is that even without patents, breeding plants for a particular set of characteristics is a ton of work and the rights system is a patent-like way to commercialize.
If you have a different idea for solving this particular financial problem, I expect quite a lot of people would love to hear about it.
You objection to "patenting life" seems utterly spurious and would effectively end GMO seeds (as the effort expended creating them could not be recouped.) But perhaps that's your ulterior motive. I see no legitimate motivation for your position.
Discovery isn't. Look at all the RCs and other designer drugs around, or Shulgin. I could pull a shit out of my ass and probably find a microbe with something noteworthy in it.
A lot of this shit just happens by accident. LSD, Viagra, Penicillin off the top of my head. All had huge impacts too.
It's everything post, and a bunch of overpaid jackoffs and hullabaloo. You're not going to take an RC with an open license to market because there's a billion dollars in intermediary steps between finding it and proving it's safe and effective.
Am I though, or am I just looking arbitrary restrictions put in place by various governments either directly or indirectly curbing deliverable drugs? Oh and pharma's shitty business practices.
I don't think it's fair to call it economics when all the costs are derived from legal fictions and stakeholder disinterest.
Yes, drug discovery can become much easier if you don't have to show the drugs work and are safe. Any old chemical can be called a drug in that case; you don't even have to laboriously search through the exponentially vast space of possible chemicals for the winners.
Yeah I guess we ahould go from one extreme to the other and totally forget all the biochemistry and public knowledge of drugs we've accumulated in the last 100 years.
As to working the baseline efficacy benchmark is 30%. Not really a stunning number considering it has already been selected as a remedy for something specific at that point. Curatives aren't marketable when profit motive of stakeholders is involved.
Big pharma peddles snake oil, too, by the way. Serotonin theory is becoming increasingly unpopular and SSRIs are looking increasingly dangerous as a clinical proposition, and they're frequently misused in clinical settings. Despite all of that they're taken by 13% of Americans, and the trend points towards an increasing number. Lest we forget: the pretension of safety Pharma acts under has been dangerous in many instances.
There's plenty of ethnogenic compounds that smack against your theory, too, by the way. In any case, to my knowledge, most of these "drugs" are derivative from known-active compounds, altered then patented (sometimes finding better therapeutic doses, lower toxicity, better dose response). At this point the laborious search is relatively smaller. Not to mention it's currently being offset to molecular dynamics which allows us to engineer hypothetical molecules against simulated proteins including those that are dysfunctional as well as model pathways for synthesis.
But look at the flip side where the court ruled the farmer cannot be liable for a plant naturally spreading into his field (and the farmer upon learning this using the specific herbicide meant for that specific plant strain). You now have precedent that if the plant "accidentally" (wink wink) spreads to your field you are not liable for the cost of the plant
To be totally honest, I am fine with the situation you just described. The only argument in favour of IP is "but what about the economics of the seeds?" i.e. "but how will corporations get rich without it?" and my answer is: they will have to find some other way to contribute to humanity than placing a stranglehold on the freedoms of the poor.
Edit for those whose rebuttal is all too predictable: I know this affects the incentive structure for developing new science. But I don't think it's at all clear that the current incentives are actually a good thing in the long run. Alternatives for income could be one of the following: providing a service, producing and selling the seeds, working with local farmers to help them maximise yield from the seeds you developed, securing donations from those who stand to benefit from your research... etc.
Your logic would apply to all seeds, right? If you have any plant on your property and you can't provide a receipt for its seed or conclusively prove that a bird dropped the seed, you should be convicted of theft.
So what? I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want on my field as long as I don't use pesticides or processing that has been banned by law, without anyone being allowed to sue me for that.
As a farmer with experience growing roundup-ready crops: In order to obtain roundup-ready seeds you have to sign a contract with the vender. In said agreement, you agree to not do such things.
If you want to do whatever you want with your field, don't enter into contractual agreements where you agree to follow certain rules.
> As a farmer with experience growing roundup-ready crops: In order to obtain roundup-ready seeds you have to sign a contract with the vender. In said agreement, you agree to not do such things.
The farmer had not entered into any contract with anyone, that is the point. It's not his fault if pollen from his neighbor's field entered his field, even if they contained "patented" technology.
If you are referring to a case where litigation was executed under the terms of patent contract, the farmer – being a member of the public who grants such patents – has still entered into a contract by virtue of choosing to be a member of the public who has agreed that patent contracts are desirable to issue. The public had no obligation to issue the patent, but chose to. The farmer need not be a member of that public, but chose to be.
Then, without a license, he had no right to exploit the patented technology. The farmer acted in a way that showed a knowing and deliberate exploitation of the patented technology. There seems to be a disconnect here, but I'm not seeing it. Can you help me with what I've missed?
This thread is going in circles. As mentioned a few comments ago, it's clearly not the case that the technology "blown onto your land by the wind". The farmer was intentionally engaging in artificial selection to get plants with roundup ready traits. I can be sympathetic to the claim that a patented program magically appeared on your computer because of random bit-flips, but I can't be sympathetic if you deliberately set up a system to generate bit-flips on your computer in a specific way so as to produce the desired program.
And note that this farmer would not have successfully obtained glyphosate resistant plants just by spraying his field, in the absence of the contamination. If it were that easy, GMOs wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
Then he acted in a way that made it clear he was using the patented materials without a license. Specifically, spraying his fields with Round-up that would have killed everything that was not patented.
You can shrug and say "Oh, it was clearly an accident, Monsanto is evil". And Monsanto is certainly evil. It's just reasonably clear why the judge would view this behavior as deliberate and knowing infringement of a patent.
Yes, the original statement was overly narrow in its view of patents and contracts. Not only should you not enter into contracts that restrict how you can treat your fields, you should also not deliberately act in a way designed to infringe the rights of others if you want to be free to do as you please within the law without incurring liability.
For example, you should not deliberately cultivate a patented plant for which you lack a license from your neighbor's plot of land and then treat it in a way that only makes sense if you're doing that. That will incur liability when a judge notices you are trying to dodge licensing. To put it another way, using processing banned under law.
We shouldn't enforce absurd patents like that in the first place. What's the worst that happens? Some old people starve because their retirement investments tank?
> the story they want to tell is that they were sued for cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on their fields, but the facts established at trial were that, however the seeds ended up there, the farmers deliberately exploited the patented system.
I don't understand the distinction you're making. "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them. Do you mean that it's illegal to buy Roundup if you haven't already bought the seeds that go with it, or something?
Edit: I think maybe you're saying that Monsanto has patented the very act of applying Roundup to a Roundup-Ready crop. So not only are the seeds and pesticides patented, but the method of applying one to the other is patented. If that's the case, that's a dumb patent that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
It's not illegal to purchase and bulk-spray Round-up to an incompatible crop. It's just stupid. It is expensive and it will kill the plants.
The lawsuit alleged that the farmer's behavior was so stupid that he must have known his crop was Roundup-Ready.
That's not consistent with accidental pollination. It suggests that he deliberately cultivated or obtained seeds that were Roundup-Ready and that he knew his crop would survive the pesticide. Bulk-spraying Roundup establishes awareness and intent.
The farmer was unable to provide a convincing explanation for why he would attempt to poison his entire crop, year after year, so the court concluded he was engaged in deliberate patent evasion.
It's worse than that: the farmer knew there was slight contamination of his field with Roundup Ready plants. So, he deliberately sprayed the field with Roundup to kill all the others, applying artificial selection to concentrate the trace of contamination. I believe he repeated this more than once. So, he was guilty of engaging in deliberate production of not trace, but concentrated patented seeds.
Hang on. He didn't plant the patented seeds; he planted his own seeds, which were then pollinated by his neighbour's Roundup-Ready plants. I can't see anything wrong with that.
So now he has a crop that consists of hybrids. These hybrids are all different; each plant is a different mixture of <farmer's variety> with Roundup-Ready. Some of those plants will have resistance to glyphosate. Then he sprays with Roundup; the resistant plants survive, the rest die. Now he has a harvest of seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, but in all other respects are a mixture. These seeds are not the ones sold by Bayer/Monsanto.
So is it the strain that is patented, or the gene?
If it's the strain that gets the patent, then the farmer-next-door isn't growing your patented strain, so he's in the clear. So it must be the gene, right?
If it's the gene, then it seems unreasonable to yell "patent violation" if you're spreading patented pollen over the entire midwest. You must either sell seeds that don't make (viable) pollen, or you have to accept that the farmer had his crop involuntarily infected with your IP because of your negligence.
I thought the GMO manufacturers bred sterility into their strains for just that reason.
Meanwhile, the farmer-next-door now has a grain-store full of resistant hybrid seeds, that won't (on the whole) fare as well as Roundup-Ready, because they're all different strains. That is, having the resistant gene isn't the whole story; you need a strain that is resistant AND grows well AND is consistent. That means an F1 hybrid, and you don't get that by just crossing strains; you have to get into selecting and cloning the favourable strain, growing that strain into a crop, and letting it cross with its (identical) siblings to make true-bred seeds.
You can't use selective breeding to escape a patent.
You can argue that patents of all sorts are invalid and shouldn't be granted. That's a totally coherent argument and not one you'll get a lot of pushback about on HN. I don't agree, but I don't, like, viscerally disagree.
The problem is we have a lot of weird special pleading arguments about this particular patent. The most popular argument, which I think we've done a pretty good job debunking here, is that Monsanto will sue you for unwittingly cultivating their seeds, as if they'll just sort of pop out of the woodwork saying "gotcha! you didn't realize it but you owe us one million dollars!". That never happens. You got in trouble with Monsanto if you quite wittingly applied their patented system, full stop.
Similarly, it's kind of a weird special pleading argument to say that a Monsanto seed can blow onto your property, and then, like, it's just something growing in the ground, man, you can't outlaw a plant, and two or three growth cycles later you somehow have a Roundup Ready seed that is unencumbered by patents. A good rule of thumb is that if you've filled in the "???" in the Underpants Gnome construction --- here: "1. seeds blow onto field, 2. ???, 3. profit", something has gone wrong with your logic. The direct conclusion of your logic is that these farmers could in fact go into business competing with Monsanto selling GM crops. Obviously: no.
The farmer new that some of the seeds in the field were the "roundup ready" ones that had blown over from the other field. Most of them were normal crops that would die when applied with roundup. He then applied the entire field with roundup, killing most of the crop in the field, with the explicit goal of saving all the remaining seeds so that he could plant them next year without paying monsanto.
No, the distinction was that the fact that they used RoundUp (which would have killed the crops they claimed to have planted) suggests a motive. The farmers claimed that the seeds had just drifted into their field by chance, Monsanto claimed they'd deliberately planted them. The fact that they sprayed the resulting crop with a herbicide that would have killed their own crop seriously calls the farmer's account into question. How would they possibly have known that enough seed had just blown over the road that it was safe to spray?
>Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them.
Roundup is a herbicide. It kills normal plants. Monsanto sells seeds that were genetically modified to resist it. It doesn't make any sense to spray it on natural plants.
My understanding of OP is that the farmer used Roundup on his crops knowing full well that his "natural" and "non patented" crops will be killed by Roundup, which the patented plants are naturally immune to by design.
What is a farmer to do when mother nature infects his crop, against his will, with pollen from the GMO crop? I think the lawsuit should go the other way. Monsanto should pay for destroying the ability to grow heirloom seeds without getting infected. They want to keep it protected? Then require it to be grown in quarantine.
Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that his crop is being pollinated against his will, and why should he lose the freedom to spray something on his crop because his neighbor planted a certain seed? Why does it have to infect everyone like a virus?
Because spraying roundup on non-roundup ready crops has 1 outcome, it kills them. There is no reasonable reason to do it other than to avoid the patent.
If roundup ready crops end up in your fields accidentally and then you don’t spray roundup you don’t run afoul of litigation.
Spray his crops with something that will 100% kill all of his original crop and only keeping the cross contaminated crop, which he will then specifically cultivate. Common now, it's really a shut and close case. He had no explanation as to an alternative valid reason to have done so and lost the case.
This is another case where patent law superseded physical trespass and pollution/littering laws.
Monsanto should have paid the farmer for polluting the farmer's field ALONG WITH being required to remove all Monsanto-owned plants. And if that means roundup-ing the whole field, paying for all damages treble, and then removing the living plants, so be it.
But no harm was done to the farmer, had the farmer not himself performed an act showing he was violating the patent. So, Monsanto didn't owe the farmer anything. The farmer had "unclean hands".
All made possible because Monsanto controls the seeds and the majority of glyphosate production so they could correlate consumption with who hadn't paid the toll.
The farmer may have claimed they weren't trying to. The fact they used Roundup, which would have killed their crop if it weren't the GM seeds, indicates otherwise.
He planted a field next to someone else's roundup ready crop. He then collected the seeds from the whole field. Next year he planted the seeds collected, waiting for the crop to start growing and sprayed roundup, which killed all seeds not roundup ready. Then the new crop went to seed and since all the parents were roundup ready, the seeds also were roundup ready (I'm not sure if roundup ready is a recessive or dominate trait, which will influence which % is roundup ready using basic genetics). Those final seeds were collected and were enough to have a whole field that was roundup ready next year.
> I remember, there was a case where a farmer grew patented plants on his field. They spread to his neighbours field who then got sued by the patent holding company for not licensing that plant. My memory is a bit fuzzy here but you get the idea.
You are thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise.... He is often heralded by anti-GMO activists as an example of the dangers of GMOs and Monsanto, but the fact of the matter is that the "cross contamination" is a myth. He deliberately took cultivars from his neighbour's plot and analysis showed that they comprised a significant portion of his crops, which wouldn't be possible by cross-pollination alone.
Should seeds be patented? Are Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta, and agrochemicals companies evil? These are all worth discussing (the answer to the second question is yes), but that particular myth is not.
> He deliberately took cultivars from his neighbour's plot
You mean stole? Where do you see this in the link you provided?
That's what I read in the article.
> As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[4] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola.
> The court heard the question of whether Schmeiser's intentionally growing genetically modified plants constituted "use" of Monsanto's patented genetically modified plant cells. By a 5-4 majority, the court ruled that it did. The Supreme Court also ruled 9-0 that Schmeiser did not have to pay Monsanto their technology use fee, damages or costs, as Schmeiser did not receive any benefit from the technology.
Used their technology, yes, barely. Stole it? Well, the courts unequivocally didn't feel like he damaged (deprived?) Monsanto of anything.
I'm very close to the IP abolitionist end of the spectrum. For copyright, give works 20 years of protection. Beyond that you have to start paying hefty fees for 10 year blocks. The fee can double every 10 years. You want a Mickey Mouse ad infinitum copyright? If you're prepared to pay billions for it, go right ahead.
Patents should generally not exist. Software patents should absolutely never exist. The fact that companies game patents so we still have insulin under patent 100 years after its invention by doing minor changes is not just a bad actor, it's a bad system.
GM crops are particularly egregious because seeds don't stay in a field. You can infringe a patent because some animal decided to eat a plant and then relieve itself on your field.
There's another angle though: not only are seed subscriptions (let's face it, that's what this is) just another way to extract the last few dollars from farmers, it's downright anticompetitive. You think the farms Big Ag are operating are paying those fees? Of course not.
On the contrary, I would bet a fair amount that ADM and similar are scrupulous about paying for hybrid seeds from Bayer and similar every year. They may get a better rate for being a very large customer, but that's true in almost every arena.
GM crops are actually one of the areas (along with pharmaceuticals) where patents are most legitimate. Crop plants are literally things that manufacture themselves; the barrier to entry if patents didn't exist would be negligible. No one could justify the effort to create new plant varieties.
People were inventing things long before patents existed. That doesn't mean patents are worthless. Let's not engage in foolishly binary thinking, where "things are invented" and "things aren't invented" are the only two states.
There are two interesting things here from a legal perspective.
1. Licensing works on the commercial seeds because they are patented, and thus the company that makes those seeds can dictate license terms on the farmers. As far as I can tell, these open seeds are not patented and thus their creators can't really impose license terms on the buyers unless they sign a contract before sale. That would be treated solely under contract law, not patent/copyright law.
2. Apparently these seeds use some sort of shrink-wrap license agreement as quoted below, which attempts to form the contract agreement mentioned in #1.
"The license is printed on every OSS seed package in Europe. Whoever opens an OSS package agrees to never patent these seeds or future breeding of them."
Considering the general dislike for/legal questionably behind shrink-wrap agreements, this sounds like a very poor way to enforce the OSS license. Also it is uncertain how valid this agreement is unless the seeds are patented (in that case the buyer's OSS rights can be granted via patent license terms).
> …this sounds like a very poor way to enforce the OSS license
I thought the same thing, reading the article.
A much more effective way, IMO, would be to establish a trust or foundation with the desired openness characteristics (eg FRAND) defined in its charter, and then have participants assign IP rights to the organization in some contract.
Or, as I said in my other reponse, just end the patent system.
The other other option aside from having specific contracts (as stupid as it sounds) is to patent the seed itself and then license out the patented seed using open terms.
I suppose a company that wanted to use some of the genes in its own patented products would just get somebody else to open the packet for them so that they wouldn't be bound by any contract.
This is interesting, why can licenses like GNU GPL3.0 be enforced in US courts but not for new plant varieties?
> "Legally, Open Source Seeds (OSS) in Europe works slightly differently because of EU seed protection laws. While in the US the OSSI pledge would be hard to enforce if challenged in court, Johannes Kotschi, the founder of OSS Germany, went with an open source licensing model. The license is printed on every OSS seed package in Europe. Whoever opens an OSS package agrees to never patent these seeds or future breeding of them. OSS cooperates with bakeries such as Le Brot in Cologne that offer bread baked with OSS wheat and rye, not least to raise awareness."
It's an interesting concept, but legally it doesn't make any sense. You can't license what you don't own. If the hybrid seeds are not available in compliance with the GPL, then you would just be violating two licenses.
Article really lacks specifics. The reason so much of the USA grows “patented” seeds is because they’re created specifically to be sprayed with herbicide and not die. There’s no alternative to to patented seeds without making fundamental changes to agriculture practices.
Hybrid seeds are also different than open-pollinated in that the children do not grow true to parent. Even if we removed the patents, they wouldn’t be valuable without a way to create them again (using two specific parents).
1) There are multiple herbicides and multiple pesticides and different ways to skin a cat, not all of which are patented, or for many, the patents have expired.
2) Your second point is more applicable. Who is going to grow these seeds? People underestimate how much agriculture is devoted solely to seed crops.
There are a lot of those fields around growing just seed. Some are Bayer owned, others are regular farmers who contract with Bayer to grow seed as their crop. One of the most common jobs for young farm kids is "detasseling" where they go around to seed fields to cut the tassel (male part of the corn plant) off some of the plants. Normally you plant 1 row of male plants, and 4 rows of female plants, since corn plants are both male and female, they need to cut off the male parts of the female plants. (the male plants produce corn on the female parts that is not used for the seed). You can just assume that every rural kid between 15 and 18 does the above job for a couple summers, which gives you an idea of the scale.
> You can just assume that every rural kid between 15 and 18 does the above job for a couple summers
Interesting assumption. As a corn farmer, I've never seen anyone growing seed corn in person. It was certainly not a job I had when I was a kid of such an age. Obviously someone does out there, but you may be overestimating just how prevalent it is.
But do people really underestimate how much crop land is used to grow seed? What do people think? 1%, 5%? What is the reality? I don't actually know... As a farmer I would be very surprised to discover it was as 10% or 15%! I assume it is more like 0.01%. I regularly grow 70bu/ac wheat and seed 2ish bu/ac to produce that.. the corn/rice/soybean ratio is better I think but I haven't ever considered it in detail.
I'd guess that the people wanting unpatented seeds are the same people who want to avoid the use of additives such as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilisers.
Certainly there are alternatives. The Congress could make it impossible to patent seeds or other organisms. They haven't, for reasons involving philosophy, money, and perhaps the deep corruption Citizens United has spawned. They probably won't. But alternatives do exist.
I have tried and liked Dazzling Blue Kale and Gildenstern Lettuce. I'm trying out some other OSSI lettuce varieties this year, of which there are many.
The owner, the Frank Morton who was mentioned in article, is the original breeder of both Gildenstern and Dazzling Blue (and they probably grew the seed being sold by Fedco). All the varieties he bread (of which there are many) are released as OSSI varieties, plus they sell other OSSI varieties as well.
"Open Source Air molecules Loosen Big Air's Grip on World's Breathing Population"
Abusing intellectual property concepts to effectively feudalise society is not a good design. "Big Ag" has been granted a license to operate. This license could be taken away.
Open source seeds as in the Open Source Seed Initiate [1] come with a GPL-like pledge that you won't restrict creations from seeds based on these seeds [2]
> You have the freedom to use these OSSI-Pledged seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.
I'm not against this idea--I'm just frustrated by the fact that this is now something we have to spell out explicitly and back with the threat of legal action, instead of common sense.
They serve a legitimate public purpose, to allow the creators of new plant varieties to earn enough to justify their creation. Why are you entitled to the results of this effort but deny the creators their due? Do you think these varieties just come into existence out of thin air, and those patenting them are somehow unfairly exploiting a windfall?
That's a sarcastic post I assume? Because the notion of patenting life forms is simply evil. No one should be entitled to it. And those who allowed it are corrupt crooks.
I utterly reject your assertion that patenting life forms is evil. There is nothing wrong with it. Indeed, patenting crop plants can greatly contribute to human welfare. I consider your interference with that for spurious reasons to be the evil here.
Utterly rejecting won't whitewash it and excusing this with "contributing to welfare" is double evil in itself.
Those who wanted to contribute to welfare wouldn't have tried to patent it. Like those in the above link for example. They contribute to welfare, not the scum like Monsanto and Co.
I'm just informing you that your ethics here are without rational foundation. Why should anyone care one iota what you consider to be evil, if you cannot justify it? This merely reflects your irrational phobias, not anything anyone else needs to take seriously.
Yes, you are the touchstone that defines what ethics is. Everyone else must bow down to your pronouncements; asking for justification is not allowed (is that also "evil"?)
> The farmers saved a percentage of the seeds and sowed them again the next spring. However, this is not a lucrative model for profit-oriented multinational companies, since the seed breeders only earn a profit during the first sale and not again every year.
Was the "inability of the produced seeds to be sowed again and turn into a crop" intentionally baked into the seeds sold by these companies, purely for profits?
Or was there a genuine biological / physical limiting factor? E.g. crop will be more susceptible to pests?
Nearly all modern crops are hybrid strains, which means the offspring won't have the same genotype as the parents. This is the real reason why re-planting doesn't work well. It's not anything nefarious.
"Nearly all modern crops are hybrid strains"
This is a "citation needed" situation here, the corn & Canola seed markets are certainly dominated by hybrids but very plentiful drops like wheat and rice are not to the best of my knowledge. If you have sources for this I am very interested to read up on it.
>Was the "inability of the produced seeds to be sowed again and turn into a crop" intentionally baked into the seeds sold by these companies, purely for profits?
No, it's purely a contractual limitation. Farmers need to sign the rights away and performing experiments with seeds blown on your land is considered a breech of contact law (i.e. you don't even need to purchase the seeds to violate IP regulations). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
Do plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds have some kind of advantage, or is it purely so the seed producers can continue selling the seeds?
I remember when I first heard of roundup ready crops as a child, that aspect of it completely baffled me both in why and how they would make plants not replantable.
It's still not 100% understand how this actually happens (heaps models and results exist), but when you cross two reasonably distantly related parents, the offspring F1 will outperform both. However, if you then backcross the offspring again, you'll lose that hybrid vigor, and your F2 behaves like crap again (often the F2 is also all over the shop in the phenotype, which makes harvesting annoying with different flowering times, different sizes etc.)
That's the whole business model of the seed companies: keep on remaking F1s, sell them. There's nothing nefarious or GM about this, it goes back to the 50s and 60s with Norman Borlaug making hybrid F1s in wheat triggering the green revolution.
It is not just the hybrid vigor. In fact, I would say the main advantage of the F1 hybrids is actually lower phenotypic variance of the crop.
Sure you will have hybrid vigor in an F1, but you can get that vigor with a four-way cross of pure inbred lines too. But the four-way progeny will also be highly variable.
If I were a farmer I too would want the consistent low variance of F1 isogenic progeny. An inbred line optimized for environment X could work. In some (rare) cases engineered inbreds can be even better than F1s but they may not work well out in the real world of environmental flux.
What's nefarious is being coerced to take on foreign debt to buy these seeds and then watching the country fall apart because the food is for domestic consumption and not for export, which means there will be a trade deficit as the seed exporter is not obliged to import products from your country (which violates Say‘s Law that so many people seem to hang onto). So your only option is to send all the bright people in your country to the seed exporting country so they can earn domestic currency so that your country can afford basic food production.
You can then chalk all of this up to corruption and incompetence and government mismanagement even though it is quite literally just a trade deficit that could be solved by having the other country import your products. This is why Keynes suggested his Bancor system, because it gets two countries to fix their trade imbalances instead of pointing fingers and starting a blame game that helps nobody.
Says someone who I would guess has never been hungry a day in his or her privileged life?
There is a valid argument to be made that food scarcity, like housing and medical care should not be subject to capitalist profit-taking. That some information is so beneficial to the common good that it can never be a trade secret.
Also your tone is downright disrespectful and should be moderated.
I never knew about this. That's interesting. So then hybrid vigor is the reason farmers don't grow their own seeds, which contradicts the article. Obviously the OSS people would know this, so then the purpose must be more about encouraging plant diversity and allowing more companies to sell these varieties to farmers.
Hybrid vigor is also why eugenic nightmares are misconstructed. If some nefarious dictator wanted genetic supersoldiers, he'd breed them by hybridizing sickly inbred strains, and then prohibiting the supersoldiers from themselves reproducing.
Hybrid vigior is known to apply to plants. It isn't clear if it applies to humans. While it is known that marrying your sibling (brother/sister) is bad, and near cousins are a questionable, is it better (for your children) is you are very distant? Should you look to a different continent for a spouse? I don't know for sure, but the evidence I've seen doesn't support that. Unlike with plants, so long as your are more than 5th cousins away (I'm not sure where the line is, so I picked something distant enough that I think everyone will agree it is too far) there doesn't seem to be any advantage in getting more distant.
Hybrid was discovered in the 1930s. WWII needed all the farm production the US could get to feed the rest of the world, so hybrid crops were pushed heavily on all farmers. Since then few farmers have gone back.
Lots of "normal" plants don't produce usable seeds. Basically every apple you've ever had will produce a crab apple tree when planted, if you want to copy that tree you need to take a cutting and propogate that.
I suspect that these engineered plants don't have some specific "don't produce seeds" gene added in, they're just hybrids like a liger or a mule.
Not quite how apples work and planting an apple seed won't make a "crab apple" -- that is a distinct species of tree. Getting a crab apple from a seed from a store bought apple fruit is the same as planting corn and getting rye.
They are hybrids but unlike mules they are generally fertile whereas mules are frequently infertile. But the second generation produces a range of types with varying growth rates, ripening times, yields, etc.; so it is not really useful to propagate them.
The seeds produced are often plantable. For many seeds, especially GMO seeds, the grower needs to acquire a license to the seeds and agrees not to save seeds from planted crops (as you suspect, to ensure income for the seed producer).
Other seeds are patented varieties. Typically these are 'hybrids' which are a cross of two varieties of the same plant for whatever specific features they select. These seeds won't 'breed true' so the offspring will likely not be identical to the parents.
From what I understand, GMO crops won't have a very stable lineage. Nature tends to select against the genetic modifications, but I do believe most GMOs are replantable today.
This is not the case for GMO salmon, which they are trying to sterilize.
Hybrids don't have to be patented, but if they're new varieties, they certainly can be. Similarly, new varieties that aren't necessarily hybrids (eg, once were hybrids and now are stable) can also be patented.
Plants that don't produce plantable seeds have a big advantage: some seed is spilled every harvest. Farmers rotate crops, if you have corn gorwing in your soybean field that is one of the worst weeds you can have. Not only does the corn take nutrients you intend for your soybeans, it is also providing a host for any corn disease in your field that you are hoping die off now that it doesn't have corn to live in.
Pretty sure it's so you can't collect the newly produced seeds and sell them on the black market to people next season. Basically what you said, but it's not just about preventing people from 're-using' what they bought, but also preventing them from providing it to others.
I believe it's the engineering of other aspects (drought tolerance, growth factors, etc) that make them incapable of producing viable seed - not that the only engineering is to make them unable to put out fertile seed.
They get unique characteristics, like all the tomatoes look identical and have long shelf life which is important for customers because they "eat with their eyes". They also taste like shit but who cares, right?
The only advantage is that these companies can force the farmers to keep buying seeds from them. It is the susbscription based revenue model for agriculture :)
GMOs, Seed patents, gene technology ownership, wind blowing pollen bearing inventions, - Those interested in the Monsanto vs Schmeiser case in the Supreme Court, you will find all facts in the documentary book by Annabel Soutar "Seeds" https://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Annabel-Soutar-ebook/dp/B00AQ3W...
Trying to work out what's going wrong in the cases this article describes, such that the principle "you can't patent something that exists" apparently doesn't apply. Is it that an independent breeder develops a certain strain, say red salad, and then a big company makes a modification to that strain, and patents the modification, such that the independent breeder is prevented somehow from continuing to develop red salad? That still doesn't make perfect sense to me but it makes more legal sense than "company got patent on what you already made, you can't make it anymore", which is just not how patents work.
The cases that the article talks about (broccoli and red carrot), the researchers shared the seeds/plants with other researchers without applying for any patents or open disclosures. I don't think Seminis is really saying that they can't make it anymore, rather the issue is that for a common farmer it is not worth planting something and worrying about a lawsuit from Monsanto/Seminis to prove they provence of the seeds.
With open source seeds,
1. The farmer knows that they there are no legal issues with using specfic seeds
2. The onus is on Seminis to prove that their seed is not a derivative of open-source seed, which means they have to file a lawsuit against a non-profit (hopefully well funded) instead of a lone farmer
Can the do forage turnips next? I have gotta get a few acres of turnips in the ground next month for forage for my cattle come drought season. The variety of forage/fodder plants is so sparse.
The solution to this would actually be to end the existence of Intellectual Property and allowing people to do what they want with the things they own.
It would also solve most of the issues with copyright in memes, YouTube and the like
It's fascinating how everything that make up civilization is being reimagined as we speak. This is really just the beginning of a new millennium and look at all that's already happened since 2000.
Wouldn't it be better to labeled protected produce with patent numbers? Then you force the cost and overhead on them rather than the fledgling open-source seed movement.
That would be pretty hilarious. I don’t think it would really work, but what could work is labeling the seeds with precise information about what patents they embody. Farmers could then collect the seeds and store them against the day the patents expire. Once the patents are expired (which can take up to 20 years), they can start planting them with no restrictions.
Side note, unrelated to the main post, but I read "open source", "seeds", and "A's and immediately thought farmers are raising big VC funding rounds. I think I need to start reading other kinds of news.
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations.
Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us.
If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires sooner.
In practice, the big companies usually have a ton of vague questionable defensive patents that cover a huge space of "inventions", so even if the smaller companies try to sue, they will get avalanched by an array of patent suits that could potentially bankrupt the company.
I'm all for reforming patents, but this seems like it's more a part of a larger set of problems with how civil suits are really only a tool for the big guys, namely:
1. With inadequate penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits, filing frivolous lawsuits becomes a strategy. I've unfortunately had a close friend be a victim of this strategy. I won't name my friend, but I will name that Jared Kushner's companies were the (repeated) plaintiff. If we close the loopholes around patents (and we should) it will only make the filing of frivolous lawsuits slightly less efficient, because the lawsuits will get thrown out quicker. Note that even if the lawsuits get thrown out, they still cost the defendants money to get them thrown out, so patent reform wouldn't even necessarily mean they can't file patent lawsuits, it just means the lawsuits might get thrown out slightly faster.
2. Justice isn't possible in civil suits where the plaintiff and defendant have disparate resources to pay for counsel.
Exactly. Companies file and retain patents that aren't defensible or questionable for defensive purposes. Perhaps the patents won't hold up in court but given enough of them you can bankrupt someone before they can prove them all invalid.
Not a bad line of thought. We also have to solve the problem where you have e.g. China and corporations in China blatantly flouting any IP laws. If we did have a just IP regime (we don't) it would continue to be severely undercut by this problem. Somehow, if it's even possible, we need buy-in/treaties etc. from the major economies.
Wait that actually makes a ton of sense, at least in theory. Never thought about it this way. Though there’s probably a want to amortize risk of failed research projects, failed as in “didn’t contribute to a product”?
The pitfall there is that there is no guarantee of revenue. You also invite the possibility of predatorily delaying revenue generation. Potential revenue generated would be more on the nose.
In another sense, sustaining a patent until it generates sufficient revenue can be seen as oxymoronic to the idea that patents incent products that serve the public interest - since, if the patent is not creating value, how can it be in the public interest?
Patent lifespans are already sort of considered based on potential revenue generated, and use number of years as a proxy for that
You wouldn't need to get rid of the current limits, just expire the patent sooner. If a company generates $10 Billion dollars in the first 5 years of their 20 year patent the reminding 15 years isn't necessary to incentivize innovation.
Rewarding innovation has been archived, just skip ahead to the part where the public at large benefits.
The https://openinventionnetwork.com/ exists now too, to make defensive patents for those who want to open source their patents but keep a big corp from attacking after stealing an idea/patent.
We really want examples of large companies licensing patents or buying smaller companies for their patents. Both are examples of patents helping smaller companies against those much larger. If patents no longer existed those smaller companies would get nothing.
>Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us.
why? why does it have to be only larger companies? if its a free for all, i copy your product, you copy mine. how is that not free market? people will choose so let them.
you could decide to not publicly release a product but you risk your competitor "inventing" the same thing in their own way so you can only either release it first or make the biggest noise.
I could see a scenario if this were the case where some company works out a way to sit on a patent adjacent to something they sell so that they keep competitors from using the idea, while not actually using the idea itself (or using it in a way engineered not to make a profit). That way they can maintain their entrenched position longer by squashing innovation.
Large companies have patent warchests, and can engage in long-term litigation to ensure small companies cannot compete. Patents do nothing to protect small companies from that. "Ignoring patents" as you say would help level the playing field for every company, and ensure companies cannot do things like patent XOR and destroy all of their competition.
>Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us.
Truly small operations don't have the bandwidth or resources to even file for a patent. So it's pretty much only medium sized companies or those with the backing of powerful groups who take advantage of the patent system.
The data are readily available.[0] It seems that small businesses actually can file patents. Even small teams and individuals can file patents, and do. I fact, patents per employee seemingly decreases as company size increases.
I successfully patented a product and licensed that patent to a small company that does quite well selling a product based on that patent. It did cost about $15k, but that's business risk. If a megacorp ever infringed the patent, we could sue them. Sure, they could try and work around it with other designs, but their product wouldn't work as well.
"Of course, salad is no software, and the work of plant breeders has to be protected. Otherwise they might fare like plant breeder Jim Baggett in Oregon, who in 1966 started breeding broccoli with an extra-long stem so it could be harvested more easily. He shared his novel broccoli with researchers and other breeders — until Monsanto-offspring Seminis patented a broccoli with exactly that trait in 2011. Baggett could trace more than a third of the plant material to his work. "
> The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.
The problem with ending patents is the alternative is medieval guilds that jealously guard their knowledge, sometimes using lethal force. The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure. The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems have become too complex for independent patent examiners to really understand them, which has allowed many companies to amass a huge portfolio of techniques that are obvious to people in the field even if they appear novel to an external observer.
At least patents expire in a reasonable amount of time. Copyright is in a far worse place.
> The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
That works when the patents is some simple thing anyone can understand. Nothing is like that anymore. Every interesting line of research requires a specialist to understand it, and every specialist represents a high opportunity cost. In practice only a few people could hope to benefit from the publication.
Throw into that the fact that it's actually lawyers who write patents, and thus they are written in legalese.
> The problem with ending patents is the alternative is medieval guilds that jealously guard their knowledge, sometimes using lethal force. The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
The government & large corporations use force via the justice system & jealously guard top secrets, to the point of violence as well. Property can be seized. I'd rather have a distribution of power than consolidation, which seems to attract people who are motivated by controlling other people, thereby undermining the supposed benefits.
> The bar for getting a patent has become far too low
The process is also expensive & serves as a barrier to innovation via market monopolies. The problem with monopolies is that they don't serve the marketplace or consumers. Monopoly is pure rent for the entities that control the monopoly. It is common for a dominant company to buy the rights to a patent only to quash the technology, all to serve the dominant company's stranglehold over a market.
The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop.
That's a benefit that depends on the difficulty of reverse engineering the knowledge from working samples. As analytical instruments and procedures have improved, the relative disclosure benefit of patents has diminished. Worse, patents are increasingly written to hide the key insight in a hay stack of obfuscatory language and irrelevant examples. I can learn a lot from reading a typical 1970s-vintage chemistry patent. I can't say the same about present chemistry patents.
My father worked for Pilkingtons when they patented the float-glass process.
Lots of companies tried to copy the process (without licensing the patent). They couldn't, because the patent didn't describe all the know-how needed to make the process work. Companies that licensed the patent got the benefit of an on-site engineer that would help them get their process working. So most "plate" glass was thereafter float glass, made by paying licensees.
That is: the invention was really protected not by patents, but by trade secrets. And unlike with the mediaeval guilds, nobody had to be assassinated.
So it seems to me that in addition to being harmful, patents really are unnecessary; as long as there is also know-how. If there is no know-how, then I don't think the patent should be issued. Therefore, there is no need for patents.
I'm not sure that it's so clear cut. I think we should be more strict with accepting new patents however wrt prior work and extending them. Companies should be able to ignore patents as soon as they find prior work. Then it should become the responsibility of the patent holder to prove that there really isn't prior work. And there really shouldn't be a way to extend patents easily if at all. Patents are also benneficial in that they serve as a database of sorts of new discoveries (with pictures!). I can point to the exact US patent of the field effect transistor,[0] for example.
I personally know several people who were able to start successful careers solely based on their inventions and the protections afforded to them via patents. This seems extremely short sighted. In fact, the bigger issue to me is that patents don't matter for companies located in countries where they are not recognized (e.g. China). The biggest issue with "some little guy in his garage" inventing stuff these days is that within weeks of selling it on amazon, it'll be copied, cost reduced to a essentially non-functional version, and sold for 1/3 the price all while pushing him down in the search results via borderline illegal SEO strategies.
The patent system needs to be fixed, not done away with.
A bigger issue with for the little guy is his garage is that if his actually innovation contains some trivial subcomponent that's part of a patent troll or large competitors portfolio, they can can sued into the ground, either to leech of their success or to prevent competition. patents favor big companies and trolls, and as a legal instrument it's basically impossible to change that because the costs and complexity always favor large incumbents. I agree it's time to drop them
Exactly, you have so little leverage as an individual or small group. The pack of wolves that are patent trolls relentlessly look for small targets who can’t afford to defend themselves, and larger companies courting a deal or a buyout can implicitly threaten a similar situation.
It’s also a slightly depressing reason why I refuse to publish source for a commercial game I built, despite wanting to. The likelihood of being sued is very tiny, but why risk it when you’ve had enough success to be noticeable.
Would it be better to make patents have shorter lifespans before entering the public domain from companies of a certain size? Maybe that would level out the playing field and allow small players to be more competitive against behemoth corporations and patent trolls.
Heavily penalize patent trolling with patents that never should have been granted, prevent mafia-esque lawsuits from districts like east Texas, and drastically reduce the cost for someone to defend themselves through some form of pre-trial mediation where independent experts review the validity of a claim.
Show me where this has happened? You present a theoretical against an actual. I know more people who have been enabled via patents than have been squashed (I know of zero squashed who were actually doing something new/novel).
Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through famine reduction. Yes it sucks for farmers, but I can't see how it has been anything other than absolute boon for humanity.
Apologies for the excess of links below. I find posts that spam links annoying, but if somebody believes GM products have saved millions/billions of lives, then they won't (and shouldn't) believe rando internet guy, and all the points are pretty distinct.
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GMOs were first made available in 1994 [1]. You can find data on famine deaths over time here [2]. Global famine deaths were near zero per 100k before GMOs had been developed. As an aside on this, the reason for historic famines was often not a lack of food or crops, or even weather - but war, which disrupts supply lines and may damage production.
GMO products are also primarily only grown in the USA and Brazil. [3] Of the two largest countries in the world, India has a complete ban on GM products except cotton, and China previously had a complete ban but lately has been in a state of flux, in no small part because of trade concessions - the US really wants to sell GM soybeans to them.
The vast majority of GMOs are used to feed Americans, Brazilians, livestock, and cars. If you don't understand that last one - US/Brazilian corn is often turned into heavily subsidized ethanol fuel. Which absolutely sucks as a fuel in every possible way [4], but has found a place in the market thanks to governmental regulation.
We don't use that much corn to make ethanol here in Brazil. The share of corn in our ethanol production is only 13% of the total[1], the rest is from sugar cane. According to the research institute Embrapa, most of our corn is for human or animal consumption.
As for your affirmation that it sucks for fuel, the growth of corn as a competitor for sugar cane in the production of ethanol here in Brazil is not "thanks to government regulation". In our country, sugar cane farmers have a lot more pull with the government than corn farmers. If government meddling was an issue, it would make the use of corn as a source of ethanol more difficult, not easier.
If ethanol producers here are turning to corn, is because it has economical benefits.
There has not been a single famine since the beginning of the 20th century that was not man-made (i.e. due to either people in power preventing aid reaching those who needed it or by people in power stripping people of their food).
GMO crops have nothing to do with famine reduction.
I doubt we would call any famine post-20th century apolitical due to how recent they are but many of them likely would not have occurred if food had been easier to grow, political dysfunction aside.
Absolute boon for “humanity” is a such abstract notion. The reality is that farmers are robbed and food we eat are way less nutrient dense, etc etc. boon…for whom?
Norman Bourlag is the guy mostly responsible for the huge increases in agricultural productivity in the 20th century and he gave most of his stuff away.
> Patented seeds have funded GMO research which has saved literally hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through famine reduction.
Sources? References? Sounds like PR bullshit from Syngenta, frankly. For a start, half the world population is living off subsistence agriculture, i.e. not patented nor GMO seeds.
It's unclear in the technological sector whether the patents or the exclusive licensing of those patents are the real issue. In academic research at universities, patented research is not the problem - it's more the exclusive licensing of those patents (taxpayer-financed, as well) to private interests. A better option would be to allow any interest to use academic patents for something like a flat fee / percentage of profits arrangement.
In general though, I agree - intellectual property gives too much power to the financial sector and the lifetime of patents and copyrights should be cut in half.
When the little person in their garage invents the next light bulb, and goes to industry players to try to license it, they just steal their idea and legally stonewall them for the remainder of their lifespan.
To me, a better approach would be to limit the patent time. 5 years of protection should be plenty of time for a company that intends to develop a technology based on its invention to get a commanding lead.
Absolutist solutions can backfire in unexpected ways. We should take an iterative approach unless a single jump is the only option. My 2c.
I think the elephant in the room is that China will readily ignore any patents and produce competing products anyway. it's really tough to make money off of hardware when you are immediately undercut by the people you contract out to manufacture your product.
The other elephant in the room is that almost every other country has done the same. Examples : Germany, US and now China. Great powers are built on imitation, then innovation.
The main problem is that most patents last 20 years. To fix the problem, durations should be dramatically reduced (60% reduction would be a good start) and there should be provisions to protect against patent trolls, i.e. that your lawsuit if frivolous UNLESS you are either the original inventor or can prove an active attempt to commercialize the technology.
There is some good to intellectual property -- it's more of a tuning problem that is currently tuned for the slow moving 1800's.
"Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations."
I often think that the bigger a company or wealthier a person is they should get less things like tax deductions, patent protection, subsidies and a lot of others.
I think in total these big organizations and super wealthy people destroy innovation. They produce some cool things but at the expense of suppressing a lot of things smaller players would produce.
Do they? Any adult I've ever talked to sees patents as anything ranging from "a necessary evil" to "literally the worst thing". No one thinks it somehow helps the little guy stick it to the big players. The little guy isn't interested in sticking it to the big players, they're interested in selling to the big players.
The real use and value of a patent (or any IP mechanism) is during litigation. It's easy to say "just end patents" until two parties are in court and have nothing to form arguments around.
Easier said then done. Who's "we" here? The handful of idealists that actually understand the legal issues? Or think they do?
The main issue with patents is not that they exist but that the system for filing and enforcing them has been eroded to the point where it has become a highly effective tool for big corporations to enforce patents they arguably should not have received against smaller competitors. That's technically illegal but since it is super hard to argue that in a court, companies get away with anti competitive behavior. And of course they are actively supported in this by bought and payed for politicians. In the US that's called lobbying, in much of the rest of the world we'd label that corruption, nepotism, and graft. Not a good thing. But as old as power and politics is.
The issue is not patents but the corruption around it.
The system in the US is flooded with bull shit patents that would not be acceptable else where. A lot of those have issues with their claims being overly broad, prior art, or a complete and utter lack of novelty. This does not matter. Getting patents rubber stamped is a numbers game. You just send more patents in and eventually a few will get approved. Of course, it costs a money to register and keep patents but once you have them the system is rigged in your favor. Challenging a patent is super expensive relative to filing one. And since patent offices are under staffed, they bias in favor of approving. And also they don't like admitting they were wrong to approve.
None of this happened by accident. The system was lobbied into the shape it is in today by the largest patent holders in the US (i.e. every big mega corporation you can name). They use patents as a tool to keep competitors out of the market. And they do so very successfully. To the extent that this is becoming a problem.
The solution is fixing the system, not getting rid of it. A big motivation for this could simply be that patents are not globally enforceable. So, you might convince companies in the US to not compete but e.g. Chinese companies will happily take your patented thing and run with it. Good luck complaining about that in a Chinese court of law. And they seem to have bootstrapped a pretty nice high tech industry in recent decades there. Bad patents actually erode the competitive position of US based corporations. While they are tied up in courts being sued by patent trolls, their foreign competitors are free to compete without concern for such things. Great argument for getting politicians off their ass. The problem exists to a lesser extent in other jurisdictions of course. But the US is the most paralyzed by this.
I don't think we should end patents, as I think that someone that develops an idea has the right to profit from that idea, if she chooses so (and the same holdsfor companies doing R&D). What I think should be done, is reflecting on patents/copyright duration, as in some cases it seems too long for me, to the point that in some cases we have that the profits end up in the hands of companies that have nothing to do with the original inventor/author.
Most people support farmers because they have a romantic idea of "Old Macdonald" instead of modern agri-corps. There is no real reason for someone to care either way in this case. Not that what the average person thinks about a niche, complex, uncertain, issue should matter...
or end the offensive/defensive patterns used by modern corporations?
someone invents a thing, someone else uses thing for evil. what to do? we ban the thing!!! yes, of course, that's the solution. don't punish the one that did the evil. <hangsheadinshameatthenotion>
the federal reserve doesn't think there's empirical evidence that patents have positive societal benefits and they think there are very empirical and measurable harms.
this isn't "generally good thing that some people abuse", this is the entire patent system is fundamentally not producing any explicable benefits and significant measurable harm, there is no reason to keep it around.
the scenario about the inventor who comes up with the better lightbulb in his garage doesn't happen. if it does, somebody else copies his idea (it's gotta be fairly trivial for someone to make it in a garage) or opens up their own patent portfolios and finds an overbroad patent that describes some trivial component or practice that is widely used, and drags him into litigation that bankrupts him for the rest of his life.
in software the example would be that you get dragged by someone who has patented "e-commerce on a website" or "software updates over the internet" and the money to have lawyers fight it while you empty your warchest.
no "I would simply..." or "but a law firm would do that pro-bono" is necessary here, either, those are both real-world examples, someone tried to shake down Newegg in 2015 with the e-commerce patent for example. And it worked for a lot of previous victims, none of whom felt like Newegg that it was worth fighting on principle or for direct economic benefit alone.
Patents literally kill companies, and they don't actually produce the intended innovations. And that's the federal reserve saying it. There were debates on ending it in the 50s, and they made the wrong decision.
> If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to
recommend abolishing it.
The harms have now clearly exceeded the benefits of keeping it. It may not have been worth the trouble of abolishing it in 1958, it is now.
Can I share a shower thought? Just because this thread made me thing about how wealth is accumulating so much at the top yet there is so much poverty.
What if we put a limit on inheritance. Let say at most 100M go to your kids.
The rest is put on a fund with your name and shares a given to kids when they are born. A way to have a legacy that doesn't just go to your kids but to every kid in the next generation. Perhaps rich people can be remembered that way and they don't have to play games trying to be in the in top of forbes, etc.
The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. Hybridization is a huge benefit, one of the primary reasons to use seeds from somebody else; you get a better crop and somebody else has done the work of hybridization. It doesn't matter if your seeds are patented or not if you are using hybrids, the seeds from hybrids do not perform as well as the hybrid seeds.
While it is fantastic to have the source seeds for hybrids, those that have concerns about our agribusiness would do well to learn more about the great skill it takes. Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration.
And even outside of the seed business, specialized knowledge and skill is incredibly for boosting productivity. For example, almond farmers in California are far far more productive than pecan farmers in the South in part because of contractors who specialize in the planting and bed preparation for a new orchard. If we could transfer this skill set from California, perhaps California could stop using so much scarce water for nuts, and pecans could replace almonds for many applications.
Deep knowledge, deep tech, and high specialization are good things for advanced economies. Open source seeds definitely advance that advanced knowledge, immensely. But we must also abandon pastoral aspirations of converting farming back into a hugely labor intensive activity as it was, say, 150 years ago. Except for the few that want to do it as a hobby, our backs will thank us.