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.
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.