I don't see how this idiotic EULA can be enforceable. A farmer buying seeds from Monsanto is one thing: it's a business deal, Monsanto (or their resellers) can tack such a restriction onto the deal and it's obviously enforceable -- to a point.
But for fruits sold in a grocery store ... even if the language in the one line "contract" turned out to be enforceable, which would completely retarded but could unfortunately happen, there's an obvious and immediate flaw. It's one line, so it evidently doesn't include any provision for a grocery buyer just gifting the seeds to a grower. Even if it did, what's the recourse? Get a homeless person to spit the seeds from the grapes he just bought in a cup. Who you gonna sue? How much is the patent holder going to get from a lice-infested, pee-smelling indigent? Why do they even bother putting that there?
Seed traces in seedless grapes are almost always unviable.
Us grape growers propagate these vines from clones. Breeders who work with seedless grapes have some horomonal techniques that can get a vine to produce some % of potentially viable seeds. Or one parent in the cross is a seeded variety and the seedless grape is just the pollen source.
There won't be any viable dormant hardwood with buds on a cluster like this in the grocery store. You'd need to do tissue culture. Which involves labratory equipment, a pile of chemicals, and a totally sterile environment.
Maybe it’s harder for plants, but people do cell cultures at home and cultivate them into “fruits” all the time in mycology. Including plates, filtered laminar(ish) air flow and sterilization.
Dealing with plant cells seems a lot easier because you don’t have to conmpete with spores floating all around.
You could buy a certified clean room that’s inspected for $20k. Or build your own for a few hundred bucks.
> Get a homeless person to spit the seeds from the grapes he just bought in a cup. Who you gonna sue? How much is the patent holder going to get from a lice-infested, pee-smelling indigent?
There's really no need for this, you could have made your point without being unpleasant toward those who have fallen upon hard times.
On the subject of grapes, my wife bought a packet of three varieties yesterday with the names printed on them: "sugranineteen", "sugrathirtyfive" and "sugrathirtyfour". Turns out these are highly selected grapes from this company: https://www.sun-world.com/proprietary-grape-varieties/ I notice you need a "licensee login" to read the details about the grapes.
Needless to say they didn't taste very good, mainly very sweet.
That's literally the point of laws. Nothing in physics prevents me from pointing a gun at an innocent person and firing it, yet there are laws against that.
I don't think the first sale doctrine has ever let you manufacture a patented product just because you happened to buy one.
From the previous discussion on the article, it appears that no EULA is necessary to prevent you from legally reselling the grapes you grow from parts you buy at the grocery store. That's just a law.
Devil's advocate: I spend my life and life savings to improve a common grape variety. In the end, it worked, people love it! Why shouldn't I profit from it? No one is forcing anyone to buy my grape. Had I invented a new vacuum cleaner I would have been able to make a killing without any hostility
Problem 1: most (if not all) of the plants we eat have been intentionally improved upon at some point in their history. Many of the varieties that we consume are quite recent, so this is not a recent phenomena.
Problem 2: an EULA is a dangerous twist that goes beyond patent protection. At least patent protection is of limited and reasonable duration, while an EULA is of indefinite duration.
Problem 3: especially considering the scale of modern agriculture and the limited variety that reaches consumers, this is dangerous for food security.
1. so what? does it mean that I can't make a living improving grape qualities? Even kitchen pots have improved during the last 500 years. So has everything.
2. EULA is useless, essentially it will be enforced if you plant them and start selling grafts
3. The state can take all it wants for food security, if needed.
There is nothing saying that you couldn't make a living off of improving grapes, though it would admittedly be more difficult.
At the end of the day though, I am far more concerned about food security than the right of people to profit from IP. You can't simply wave the problem away by stating the state can take all they want. Many democratic states would be hesitant to do that and it would have far more grave long term consequences. If agriculture was more diverse, perhaps that wouldn't be a concern. The problem is the lack of diversity creates the potential to concentrate power over the food supply under the current model, never mind one with strong IP rights.
An agreement for commercial growers is one thing. That's because the growers who sign it:
a) have time to review it and consider the implications
b) benefit substantially from the exclusivity because it acts as a price support. Many growers are perfectly happy to sign these agreements because it protects their investment.
An "end-eater" agreement that purports to bind the purchaser of a food product is ridiculous.
The point isn't about you being able to profit from the creation of a new fruit, the question is, how exactly this happens. If the grapes are patented, there is legal protection in place. However it is not clear, how an EULA on the grapes sold applies to this, if at all.
Lest anyone think seed patents are simply a fact of life, there are (or were) countries where they were not valid. For example Iraq, until the US occupying force issued its 100 orders, among them order 81, which prohibits the planting and saving of patented seeds without a license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders
I am so glad I wasn't the only person that questioned this. Also in relation to another story I saw that had found tomato plants growing on railways - and found these due to the onboard toilets dumping their contents directly on the line. The assumption being the commuters ate a lot of cheese & tomato sandwiches. Does this mean disaster is inevitable?!
b) Grapes don't grow like that. They are a perennial hardwood species and need a cold stratification period before they are viable. So you'd need to poo somewhere where the seed sat over the winter and came up the following spring. Most vines in the wild grow from clones from the sprawling parent, with seed being spread by birds.
c) Don't think the company cares about you. They're worried about large farms in the central valley etc. propagating without license. As I've said elsewhere in this thread I'm not sure why they bothered printing this on the package that consumers see. Propagation agreements are very common.
This is not uncommon when you buy a new variety of plant from a garden centre. It's known as "Plant Breeders Rights" and is mainly to stop people buying the new plant and propagating it themselves with no money going back to the original breeder.
I guess it's a bit analogous to software or music piracy - making multiple copies of someone else's original work.
I think the expert they talked to had a good take. A plant reproducing is something the plant does. It's unclear whether you can be required by law to prevent it from doing its thing. (Well, it's actually not unclear; the supreme court says the law has that power. The law should probably be changed, though.)
It would be more interesting with something with a bit more free will. Someone will eventually patent a dog breed. A boy dog will meet a girl dog and they'll have dog babies. Do you put the dog in prison for patent infringement? Do you kill the babies?
All I can say is that nobody really cares about soybeans or grapes, but it will be a mess when the result is cute and fluffy.
>> A boy dog will meet a girl dog and they'll have dog babies. Do you put the dog in prison for patent infringement? Do you kill the babies?
It's the same as if your dog attacks someone - even if it's "in their breed" it doesn't matter, you as the owner are responsible for its actions. If the dog is particularly aggressive it might be destroyed though.
The hypothetical company holding the patent will argue that they are suffering financial damage, so they are losing something.
I think the dogs are a bit of a red herring here, drug patents are generally accepted by most of society, and it's patenting a natural process that happens when you throw the correct chemicals together under the correct circumstances. The "it's just chemicals reacting, nobody loses anything, nobody is hurt" argument will not get you anywhere.
One major difference is your involvement in creating the process: for drugs, you have clear intent to produce it. For the dog example, where you haven't encouraged the reproduction, by intending nothing at all, you've violated the patent
One might argue that by putting a male and a female dog together, both of them fertile, there is a clear intent for them to (eventually) reproduce. When the puppies are born you can throw your hands up in the air and pretend to be surprised, but I suspect that the judge will know how babies are made, and be very hard to convince that you did not.
They also bite inanimate objects, but as an owner you are still liable when they bite another dog or person.
At the end of the day it's up to the judge to decide what a reasonable punishment should be, which may be based on the reasonable precautions that you did or did not take. If you can't accept that then just don't own an un-neutered patented dog. I'm not sure why you find this so complicated or unreasonable.
And contrary to copyright, patents actually expire in a reasonable amount of time.
I have seen more than one lawsuit involving French Bulldogs that were bred by the wrong dogs. The Bulldogs owners sued because a litter from French Bulldogs is C-section and heavy investment in pups that can sell for $10k each.
> A plant reproducing is something the plant does.
This is not necessarily the case for a quite large number of genetically modified organisms. Many do not propagate without human intervention, as I believe is also the case with seedless grapes.
Dog breeds are different from produce varietals. With produce they get consistently the same fruit with grafting and such. The genome is locked in place.
Animal breeds are more subjective. There isn't really an analogous way to pin one down a create consistent copies. If the hypothetical dog company could do this kind of cloning, they would probably spare themselves the hassle by producing only sterilized clones.
what they can and do do, though, is refuse to certify the parentage. and other breeders, with which you would want to breed for purpose of heritage, will refuse you.
So wrapping the fruit in shrink wrap requiring you to sign a legal agreement to open it is next? Maybe if they suspect you ate without agreeing you have to provide a poo sample in a deposition? You can't go to a grocery store anymore without a lawyer? Who comes up with these crazy ideas?
I am a grape grower & hobby grape breeder so might have a perspective on this that others don't. There seems to be a few misconceptions in this thread.
1. Grapes are almost always propagated clonally, through dormant hardwood. Only grape breeders really grow grapes from seed, and they're not using the seeds from open pollinated grapes like these, they're doing deliberate crosses from pollen. If you could grow out the seeds (hint: you can't, it's seedless) from this grape you would not get something all that similar to its parent, and only maybe 15% of them would even be perfect flowered and fruit bearing. This "EULA" doesn't seem to cover pollen, which I don't think would be legally enforceable anyways.
2. Non-propagation agreements and propagation fees are extremely common. Newer varieties of grapes almost always having a fee back to the breeder.
3. Nobody is making decent money breeding grapes. Most new varieties are from university research departments on constantly decreasing budgets. The propagation fees are typically there to help offset losses.
4. The only thing unusual I see here is printing this kind of label on the package and also the proscription against growing from seed. Not sure why they'd bother. Propagating grapes from a grocery store cluster would be extremely difficult. To get a clone from it you'd need to do labratory tissue culture. To grow from seed you'd need to find the one grape in thousands that freakishly actually produced a viable seed (this variety is seedless) -- cold stratify keep it in the fridge for months without it drying out or getting mold and then plant it out in the spring, and even if you planted hundreds you would be unlikely to get a vine worth bothering with.
EDIT: Also, let's say you actually legitimately wanted to grow or even breed with this vine, and you lived in the narrow climate range where it would succeed in growing. You could probably purchase dormant hardwood cuttings from a licensed nursery for less than $5 a vine. I don't think that's so odious. Or if you're a breeder you might even be able to coax another person with the same passion to mail you some pollen from it for free.
FURTHER EDIT: Part of what might be happening here is that these new table grapes are considered by some to be a bit of a major advancement. The cotton candy type flavours are novel and the nice crisp flesh is desirable, and I believe they have pretty good shelf life as well. So the breeders are trying to protect something that is a bit of a win for them. I imagine in California in particular there is a desire to avoid growers in the central valley from propagating these en-masse without license. I imagine that in about 10-15 years there'll be a bunch of new varieties similar to these out there and it won't be as big of a concern.
They're somewhat yummy but bland and expensive table grapes, and basically flavourless beyond the sugar, which seems to be what consumers like, unfortunately. Still, it's an improvement from the little green unripe acid pellets that most people are buying. With table grapes, consumers demand seedlessness, which means there's quite a low genetic diversity since most trace their breeding back to Thompson Seedless.
I grow wine grapes, and grow in the northeast (Ontario) so I don't grow anything like this. I grow cold hardy hybrids that trace the majority of their ancestry back to wild vines that are native to eastern North America (which is the centre of diversity for the genus, BTW).
The vines I grow for wine mostly come out of the University of Minnesota grape breeding program; they are pretty bulletproof vines. I could probably grow vinifera here, but it would involve bucketloads of pesticides that I can't be bothered with.
I have plenty of "weird" grapes here because I hobby breed. I mainly work (play) with a wild species that is rare in Ontario and around the northeast, called vitis aestivalis bicolor. V. Aestivalis is a species of grape that has lower acids, higher tannins, higher disease resistance, and more neutral flavour than most of the wild grapes -- but it's also a pain to work with because it does not propagate from dormant hardwood easily, so it's been neglected in breeding. Bicolor is its northern variant that is hardy up to about latitude 43, around the southern great lakes region. I am trying to cross it with other, more cold hardy, hybrids to produce something with the lower acids, higher tannin, and more neutral flavour that bicolor has but with higher sugars and more cold hardiness. I have a number of vines here from other hobby breeders that I'm playing with as well.
High quality wine from cold hardy and disease resistant hybrids is still a "Work in progress"; growers, breeders, winemakers, and wine marketers have a lot of work to do still. But it's imperative because vinifera is becoming less and less viable every day and it's stupid to be growing it in places like Ontario. And in any case the same thing every day is boring.
Nah I'm not that organized :-) And TBH still getting setup. Has taken about 6 years to get my vineyard in a state where I could do the breeding I want to do.
Super cool reading your posts :) I grow five vines here in my urban backyard in Minnesota, all UMN varieties. This is their third year in the ground, and the first year I let them put out fruit. It was super fun making jelly with grapes I grew :)
I am growing about a 1/4 acre of Marquette and Frontenac blanc (a white sport of Frontenac developed here in Canada), and Petite Pearl which is from Minnesota, but privately bred by Tom Plocher (http://www.coldclimategrapes.com/petite-pearl.html)
I'm not blown away by Frontenac blanc and will likely take it out and replace it with another white, as the acids are very difficult to work with. Marquette is a fantastic grape overall, but the wine quite neutral to the point of uncharacteristic. Petite Pearl is low vigor, lower sugar, and small tight clusters, but it adds a nice leatheriness to the wine.. thick skins, hangs well, birds don't seem to bother with it like they do Marquette.
This year I put Marquette pollen onto the first fruit off of a local v. aestivalis bicolor vine and have a handful of seeds from that. Also put Marquette onto a complex Sauv Blanc x (Aestivales x Aestivalis Bicolor) vine that I grew from seed from Clifford Ambers. Hopefully I can get these planted out next year and get started on more complex stuff after that.
I've got a bag of these right here. A bit sweet, but aptly named ("cotton candy grapes"). They taste eerily like cotton candy the same way that a cotton candy Jelly Belly does. Kids love them of course. The company’s "gum drop" and "moon drop" grapes are _amazing_.
They also sell something called "rosé strawberries" but I haven't found them on the east coast yet.
> 2. Non-propagation agreements and propagation fees are extremely common. Newer varieties of grapes almost always having a fee back to the breeder.
Who is party to these agreements? If I am a grape researcher/breeder and buy a bag of grapes with this plastic wrapper, why would I be affected by this agreement? If the strains are patented or protected in some other way, then of course those protections would affect the end purchaser, but that is beside the point.
Nurseries agree to a propagation license from the breeder and when they sell the vines they pass a fee (usually something like $1 a vine) back to the breeder.
Growers typically buy their vines from said nurseries, who try to insure virus free vines and produce in bulk and do grafting to rootstocks, etc.
A breeder would not usually be affected, because they would work with pollen. If they were working with this vine as a parent (unlikely) they would probably as a courtesy reach out to the original breeder, but they'd just be taking pollen from it, so the "EULA" would not apply.
There are thousands and thousands of grape varieties out there. Most consumers only ever taste a dozen. The genetic diversity bottleneck for grapes comes in general from consumers lack of education and their preferences for the same thing over and over again, usually with a fancy European sounding name so they can feel sophisticated while they drink their wine from a clone of a vine from 800 years ago that had to be sprayed with fungicides every 5 days to stop it from dying.
I apologize if I'm dense, but I feel like you went far astray in this answer. I'm asking who is supposedly party to this specific agreement on printed on the plastic.
Anybody who buys the grape and tries to propagate it. But I doubt the pseudo-legalese printed there is of much use. Like I've tried to say: even if it was enforceable it's somewhat pointless as almost nobody is going to be able to do this.
EDIT: but yes, it has an entirely pointless vibe to it. I am not sure why the marketing of this product is bothering.
It's not an agreement, and both the Vice article and original Tweet are wrong to call it one. It's a statement of the law covering protected plant varieties (a.k.a plant patents). That's the contradiction.
> It's not an agreement, and both the Vice article and original Tweet are wrong to call it one. It's a statement of the law covering protected plant varieties (a.k.a plant patents). That's the contradiction.
How does this contradict me? The original text called it an agreement, _not_ me. My point is that it's _not_ an agreement. This is what's printed on the bag:
> The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of the produce, including "but not limited to" seeds, stems, tissue, and fruit.
In this whole thread I'd posited that this does not mean there is any agreement between the end recipient and the producer. Now you say this contradicts me, but it sounds like you actually _agree_ with me. I also wrote this a couple posts up:
> There are of course other restrictions like patents that apply to everyone regardless of random text put on some plastic, but that's another thing.
I see where I got confused. I missed that the original packaging text used the word "agree"; I thought it was merely a statement of patent restrictions and not an attempt to create an agreement. My opinion was based on there never being an attempt to create an agreement in the first place combined with your statement about "other restrictions". It makes sense now, and we do agree on this.
You're right, I misread your post. I don't think anyone's defending the language on the bag, just explaining what it is trying (very poorly) to convey.
> I just don't understand how those words magically enter the recipient into an agreement.
There are a lot of people and organizations who make legal statements or disclaimers that have inaccurate or even zero meaning. Sometimes, those who are making these statements are less concerned about being legally correct, and more concerned about influencing those who read the statement.
In other cases, some people have misconceptions about what the law requires of them for protection, and make unnecessary disclaimers. People love to do this with copyright.
This to me is more of an argument against allowing GMO to be entrenched than any questions of product safety; you wouldn't turn over most of the world's arable land to a single megacorp, so why allow them to take over species?
GMOs are somewhat tangential to the issue of plant patents. Genetic engineering can be, and has been[1], used to create patent-free plants. On the flip side, genetic engineering is not necessary to create patentable plants, and in fact plant patents predate commercial genetic engineering by decades.
>“The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of this produce, including ‘but not limited to’ seeds, stems, tissue, and fruit."
Food, crop and patents on life in general are pure evil. That'a the ultimate in consumer culture right there.
'You have the right to consume the food we produce for you, but we are the only ones who may produce it.'
That's legislating control over life itself to companies and corporations.
How can anyone possibly believe it's reasonable that someone could be punished because they popped some seeds into the ground and tried to grow some fruit?
Agriculture has been the cornerstone of human society for thousands of years. What gives somw corporation the right to tell people they canmt practice one of the oldest human trades in existence?
>Food, crop and patents on life in general are pure evil. That'a the ultimate in consumer culture right there.
Is there a reason why it's any more evil than patents on machinery or other industrial processes? Is it just because "life is sacred"? It's only plants and livestock. I'd be much more concerned if it extended to humans, but we're not at that point yet.
>'You have the right to consumer the food we produce for you, but we are the only ones who may produce it.'
>That's legislating control over life itself to companies and corporations.
>Agriculture has been the cornerstone of human society for thousands of years. What gives somw corporation the right to tell people they canmt practice one of the oldest human trades in existence?
So? You can still grow grapes, just not the specially engineered/bred ones. Also, it's limited to 20 years, so you can grow all the cotton candy grapes you want two decades from now.
There are zero cancer meds if humans do not dedicate resources to developing them. Right now we incentivize allocation of those resources under the promise that the successful development of a drug results in a financial reward. The change you are suggesting is not just a matter of patents but a broader conversation about economic systems.
Agreed. This argument about DRM and software rights and redistribution finds its roots in the failure of markets to distribute products that have infinite supply once they are created. Call it an "Idea Product". Information can only be duplicated, not moved. It can only be shared, not taken. And since this feature means that "Idea Products" aren't scarce, how to you price it?
The correct price is 0, just looking at it from first principles.
But we don't like that because then these "idea products" have no incentive to get made, so we pretend like supplies are limited, we limit them with patents, we limit them with DRM, we limit them with laws, pretend it's scarce so the market can price it.
To many, this is an acceptable result. Buuuut... must we use a market for absolutely everything? Even if it's clearly broken in this use case and we're just pretending it works? The fact that we are pretending is fine, even when someone's life is on the line?
I think we need something like bug bounties for information. I think we need a different kind of market for novelty.
> Information can only be duplicated, not moved. It can only be shared, not taken. And since this feature means that "Idea Products" aren't scarce, how to you price it?
Non sequitur. Ideas generated (/recorded, transformed, interpreted, etc) by human labor or human capital are scarce because human labor and human capital are scarce.
> must we use a market for absolutely everything?
Certainly not, the more applicable question is whether the change we make to the status quo results in better conditions for people. Every economic system has strengths and weaknesses.
I don't disagree with the concept of a "bug bounty for information" but I'm struggling to come up with an idea of what that would look like in a way that is either more effective or different than patents.
> I don't disagree with the concept of a "bug bounty for information" but I'm struggling to come up with an idea of what that would look like in a way that is either more effective or different than patents.
That's exactly the example I had in mind when I wrote the sentence you quoted.
Pharma grants have their own issues. Our current mixed system with both private investment and public investment allows us to leverage the strengths and weaknesses of both allocation schemes.
I feel like, ideally, such a system of incentivizing novel ideas and information should be decentralized. Bug bounties, for example, is a decentralized form of incentivizing public works.
I don't agree that's a non sequitur. We typically sell "access" to the idea, even though the supply of access is infinite. If you want to account for human labor and cost, then you're describing novel ideas, not "an idea". novel ideas are scarce, access to an idea is not.
That may seem pedantic, but that distinction is the thing we charge for access on.
The reason I'm harping on this is to make it black and white crystal clear, that the existing system we are using is a kludge. It would be shocking if such a system was flatly the best way to do things.
No idea what's better, but there are much smarter people out there than me.
The other side of the coin is that creating a market for creative work optimizes for commercializability, not necessarily any other attributes we'd consciously prefer.
How much effort in the medical industry is devoted to me-too treatments that don't really expand our therapeutic vocabulary? How many writers were focusing on writing Law & Order: Food Truck Inspectors Unit instead of something more distinctive?
I think that maybe we need to look into UBI for creatives: we'll pay you a comfortable living as long as you're regularly producing some deliverables/signs of progress, but you don't get to drag everyone else down with patents and copyrights when you're done. We could probably finance a lot of singers at 50k per year for the cost of one Rolling Stones tour.
You can always buy someone else's grape right now. Monsanto has already sued farmers that own land next to their farms because their patented pesticides drift into the other property. It's not at all unreasonable to envision a future where Monsanto (or some other company) tries to sue hundreds or thousands of farmers because one of their patented strands of some fruit has overtaken larger populations.
The sibling comment pointed out how that Monsanto lawsuit is mischaracterized. But focusing on that lawsuit misses the bigger point - they don't need to sue when they can drive farmers that don't buy from them to bankruptcy because their patented seeds enable slightly better margins.
Doing any other kind of farming will simply become unviable.
> Is there a reason why it's any more evil than patents on machinery or other industrial processes?
This is way outside my area of expertise, but my understanding is the patent would only prevent others from monetizing the patented technology for x period of time.
That to me would be the key difference. In this case the claim is you can’t even grow the grapes in your own yard non-commercially.
Is it illegal to infringe on a software patent even if you’re not distributing or profiting from the software you wrote?
If you invent a new mousetrap you get to profit from it on your own terms, and everyone else is welcome to buy in or use the old mousetrap. Replace "a mousetrap" with "an organism" and the same law and logic still apply.
Nothing is taken away from anyone, the old mousetrap is still there.
I think you're dismissing a lot of externalities here - IMO most egregious of which is ag-IP owners trying to claim ownership/control over other people's plants that have been pollinated by their GMO plants due to pollen drift.
I think a better analogy would be: you invent a new mousetrap, you offer it for $5 for only catching mice, but if it catches a rat they owe you $100. The user has to artificially restrict the fundamental utility of the product or else be subject to legal penalties.
"Life, uh, finds a way" and it's morally hazardous to restrict a customer's control of their physical property for IP reasons.
>IMO most egregious of which is ag-IP owners trying to claim ownership/control over other people's plants that have been pollinated by their GMO plants due to pollen drift.
>I think a better analogy would be: you invent a new mousetrap, you offer it for $5 for only catching mice, but if it catches a rat they owe you $100. The user has to artificially restrict the fundamental utility of the product or else be subject to legal penalties.
I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with this. If anything, I'm for it because it incentives the manufacturer to make effective products. The more effective their mouse trap is, the more money they make. Sounds like a good thing to me. It's not any different than unreal engine/unity charging you a % of your game's revenue as royalties.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadBut for fruits sold in a grocery store ... even if the language in the one line "contract" turned out to be enforceable, which would completely retarded but could unfortunately happen, there's an obvious and immediate flaw. It's one line, so it evidently doesn't include any provision for a grocery buyer just gifting the seeds to a grower. Even if it did, what's the recourse? Get a homeless person to spit the seeds from the grapes he just bought in a cup. Who you gonna sue? How much is the patent holder going to get from a lice-infested, pee-smelling indigent? Why do they even bother putting that there?
Then there's patent exhaustion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
Second, if they didn't, that would be entirely pointless.
Us grape growers propagate these vines from clones. Breeders who work with seedless grapes have some horomonal techniques that can get a vine to produce some % of potentially viable seeds. Or one parent in the cross is a seeded variety and the seedless grape is just the pollen source.
Also a skilled botanist can turn it into a tissue culture and propagate it.
Dealing with plant cells seems a lot easier because you don’t have to conmpete with spores floating all around.
You could buy a certified clean room that’s inspected for $20k. Or build your own for a few hundred bucks.
There's really no need for this, you could have made your point without being unpleasant toward those who have fallen upon hard times.
Needless to say they didn't taste very good, mainly very sweet.
From the previous discussion on the article, it appears that no EULA is necessary to prevent you from legally reselling the grapes you grow from parts you buy at the grocery store. That's just a law.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761116
With regular copyright, this wouldn't have been within my lifetime.
Problem 2: an EULA is a dangerous twist that goes beyond patent protection. At least patent protection is of limited and reasonable duration, while an EULA is of indefinite duration.
Problem 3: especially considering the scale of modern agriculture and the limited variety that reaches consumers, this is dangerous for food security.
2. EULA is useless, essentially it will be enforced if you plant them and start selling grafts
3. The state can take all it wants for food security, if needed.
At the end of the day though, I am far more concerned about food security than the right of people to profit from IP. You can't simply wave the problem away by stating the state can take all they want. Many democratic states would be hesitant to do that and it would have far more grave long term consequences. If agriculture was more diverse, perhaps that wouldn't be a concern. The problem is the lack of diversity creates the potential to concentrate power over the food supply under the current model, never mind one with strong IP rights.
An "end-eater" agreement that purports to bind the purchaser of a food product is ridiculous.
Are sanitation departments at risk of contributory infringement depending how they process and dispose of sewage containing grape remnants?
b) Grapes don't grow like that. They are a perennial hardwood species and need a cold stratification period before they are viable. So you'd need to poo somewhere where the seed sat over the winter and came up the following spring. Most vines in the wild grow from clones from the sprawling parent, with seed being spread by birds.
c) Don't think the company cares about you. They're worried about large farms in the central valley etc. propagating without license. As I've said elsewhere in this thread I'm not sure why they bothered printing this on the package that consumers see. Propagation agreements are very common.
So why are seeds explicitly mentioned in the EULA?
(Also, why is "but not limited to" in quotation marks?)
I guess it's a bit analogous to software or music piracy - making multiple copies of someone else's original work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights
It would be more interesting with something with a bit more free will. Someone will eventually patent a dog breed. A boy dog will meet a girl dog and they'll have dog babies. Do you put the dog in prison for patent infringement? Do you kill the babies?
All I can say is that nobody really cares about soybeans or grapes, but it will be a mess when the result is cute and fluffy.
It's the same as if your dog attacks someone - even if it's "in their breed" it doesn't matter, you as the owner are responsible for its actions. If the dog is particularly aggressive it might be destroyed though.
I think the dogs are a bit of a red herring here, drug patents are generally accepted by most of society, and it's patenting a natural process that happens when you throw the correct chemicals together under the correct circumstances. The "it's just chemicals reacting, nobody loses anything, nobody is hurt" argument will not get you anywhere.
What then?
At the end of the day it's up to the judge to decide what a reasonable punishment should be, which may be based on the reasonable precautions that you did or did not take. If you can't accept that then just don't own an un-neutered patented dog. I'm not sure why you find this so complicated or unreasonable.
And contrary to copyright, patents actually expire in a reasonable amount of time.
This is not necessarily the case for a quite large number of genetically modified organisms. Many do not propagate without human intervention, as I believe is also the case with seedless grapes.
Animal breeds are more subjective. There isn't really an analogous way to pin one down a create consistent copies. If the hypothetical dog company could do this kind of cloning, they would probably spare themselves the hassle by producing only sterilized clones.
what they can and do do, though, is refuse to certify the parentage. and other breeders, with which you would want to breed for purpose of heritage, will refuse you.
I think I recall they make you pay a deposit, which is refunded when the dog is "fixed".
Oh, yeah, lawyers.
On the word "use" in federal statutes, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_v._United_States
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._United_States_(1993)
1. Grapes are almost always propagated clonally, through dormant hardwood. Only grape breeders really grow grapes from seed, and they're not using the seeds from open pollinated grapes like these, they're doing deliberate crosses from pollen. If you could grow out the seeds (hint: you can't, it's seedless) from this grape you would not get something all that similar to its parent, and only maybe 15% of them would even be perfect flowered and fruit bearing. This "EULA" doesn't seem to cover pollen, which I don't think would be legally enforceable anyways.
2. Non-propagation agreements and propagation fees are extremely common. Newer varieties of grapes almost always having a fee back to the breeder.
3. Nobody is making decent money breeding grapes. Most new varieties are from university research departments on constantly decreasing budgets. The propagation fees are typically there to help offset losses.
4. The only thing unusual I see here is printing this kind of label on the package and also the proscription against growing from seed. Not sure why they'd bother. Propagating grapes from a grocery store cluster would be extremely difficult. To get a clone from it you'd need to do labratory tissue culture. To grow from seed you'd need to find the one grape in thousands that freakishly actually produced a viable seed (this variety is seedless) -- cold stratify keep it in the fridge for months without it drying out or getting mold and then plant it out in the spring, and even if you planted hundreds you would be unlikely to get a vine worth bothering with.
EDIT: Also, let's say you actually legitimately wanted to grow or even breed with this vine, and you lived in the narrow climate range where it would succeed in growing. You could probably purchase dormant hardwood cuttings from a licensed nursery for less than $5 a vine. I don't think that's so odious. Or if you're a breeder you might even be able to coax another person with the same passion to mail you some pollen from it for free.
FURTHER EDIT: Part of what might be happening here is that these new table grapes are considered by some to be a bit of a major advancement. The cotton candy type flavours are novel and the nice crisp flesh is desirable, and I believe they have pretty good shelf life as well. So the breeders are trying to protect something that is a bit of a win for them. I imagine in California in particular there is a desire to avoid growers in the central valley from propagating these en-masse without license. I imagine that in about 10-15 years there'll be a bunch of new varieties similar to these out there and it won't be as big of a concern.
Do you grow any weird grapes?
What’s cool in grape growing world these days?
I grow wine grapes, and grow in the northeast (Ontario) so I don't grow anything like this. I grow cold hardy hybrids that trace the majority of their ancestry back to wild vines that are native to eastern North America (which is the centre of diversity for the genus, BTW).
The vines I grow for wine mostly come out of the University of Minnesota grape breeding program; they are pretty bulletproof vines. I could probably grow vinifera here, but it would involve bucketloads of pesticides that I can't be bothered with.
Here's a recent podcast interview with the head of the grape breeding program at the University of Minnesota, if you're interested: https://www.organicwinepodcast.com/e/matt-clark-grape-breede...
I have plenty of "weird" grapes here because I hobby breed. I mainly work (play) with a wild species that is rare in Ontario and around the northeast, called vitis aestivalis bicolor. V. Aestivalis is a species of grape that has lower acids, higher tannins, higher disease resistance, and more neutral flavour than most of the wild grapes -- but it's also a pain to work with because it does not propagate from dormant hardwood easily, so it's been neglected in breeding. Bicolor is its northern variant that is hardy up to about latitude 43, around the southern great lakes region. I am trying to cross it with other, more cold hardy, hybrids to produce something with the lower acids, higher tannin, and more neutral flavour that bicolor has but with higher sugars and more cold hardiness. I have a number of vines here from other hobby breeders that I'm playing with as well.
High quality wine from cold hardy and disease resistant hybrids is still a "Work in progress"; growers, breeders, winemakers, and wine marketers have a lot of work to do still. But it's imperative because vinifera is becoming less and less viable every day and it's stupid to be growing it in places like Ontario. And in any case the same thing every day is boring.
Here's a presentation by an acquaintance doing interesting work: http://amherstcountymuseum.org/grapes.pdf
I haven't posted about them this year, but here's where they were last summer (year 2): https://www.smokingonabike.com/2019/06/23/minnesota-home-gar...
I am growing about a 1/4 acre of Marquette and Frontenac blanc (a white sport of Frontenac developed here in Canada), and Petite Pearl which is from Minnesota, but privately bred by Tom Plocher (http://www.coldclimategrapes.com/petite-pearl.html)
I'm not blown away by Frontenac blanc and will likely take it out and replace it with another white, as the acids are very difficult to work with. Marquette is a fantastic grape overall, but the wine quite neutral to the point of uncharacteristic. Petite Pearl is low vigor, lower sugar, and small tight clusters, but it adds a nice leatheriness to the wine.. thick skins, hangs well, birds don't seem to bother with it like they do Marquette.
This year I put Marquette pollen onto the first fruit off of a local v. aestivalis bicolor vine and have a handful of seeds from that. Also put Marquette onto a complex Sauv Blanc x (Aestivales x Aestivalis Bicolor) vine that I grew from seed from Clifford Ambers. Hopefully I can get these planted out next year and get started on more complex stuff after that.
They also sell something called "rosé strawberries" but I haven't found them on the east coast yet.
Who is party to these agreements? If I am a grape researcher/breeder and buy a bag of grapes with this plastic wrapper, why would I be affected by this agreement? If the strains are patented or protected in some other way, then of course those protections would affect the end purchaser, but that is beside the point.
Growers typically buy their vines from said nurseries, who try to insure virus free vines and produce in bulk and do grafting to rootstocks, etc.
A breeder would not usually be affected, because they would work with pollen. If they were working with this vine as a parent (unlikely) they would probably as a courtesy reach out to the original breeder, but they'd just be taking pollen from it, so the "EULA" would not apply.
There are thousands and thousands of grape varieties out there. Most consumers only ever taste a dozen. The genetic diversity bottleneck for grapes comes in general from consumers lack of education and their preferences for the same thing over and over again, usually with a fancy European sounding name so they can feel sophisticated while they drink their wine from a clone of a vine from 800 years ago that had to be sprayed with fungicides every 5 days to stop it from dying.
EDIT: but yes, it has an entirely pointless vibe to it. I am not sure why the marketing of this product is bothering.
I disagree. I just don't understand how those words magically enter the recipient into an agreement.
There are of course other restrictions like patents that apply to everyone regardless of random text put on some plastic, but that's another thing.
Thank you for the information, I'd never heard of this. But I also don't see how this contradicts me.
How does this contradict me? The original text called it an agreement, _not_ me. My point is that it's _not_ an agreement. This is what's printed on the bag:
> The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of the produce, including "but not limited to" seeds, stems, tissue, and fruit.
In this whole thread I'd posited that this does not mean there is any agreement between the end recipient and the producer. Now you say this contradicts me, but it sounds like you actually _agree_ with me. I also wrote this a couple posts up:
> There are of course other restrictions like patents that apply to everyone regardless of random text put on some plastic, but that's another thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24800561
I honestly don't understand your point.
There are a lot of people and organizations who make legal statements or disclaimers that have inaccurate or even zero meaning. Sometimes, those who are making these statements are less concerned about being legally correct, and more concerned about influencing those who read the statement.
In other cases, some people have misconceptions about what the law requires of them for protection, and make unnecessary disclaimers. People love to do this with copyright.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
Food, crop and patents on life in general are pure evil. That'a the ultimate in consumer culture right there.
'You have the right to consume the food we produce for you, but we are the only ones who may produce it.'
That's legislating control over life itself to companies and corporations.
How can anyone possibly believe it's reasonable that someone could be punished because they popped some seeds into the ground and tried to grow some fruit?
Agriculture has been the cornerstone of human society for thousands of years. What gives somw corporation the right to tell people they canmt practice one of the oldest human trades in existence?
Is there a reason why it's any more evil than patents on machinery or other industrial processes? Is it just because "life is sacred"? It's only plants and livestock. I'd be much more concerned if it extended to humans, but we're not at that point yet.
>'You have the right to consumer the food we produce for you, but we are the only ones who may produce it.'
>That's legislating control over life itself to companies and corporations.
>Agriculture has been the cornerstone of human society for thousands of years. What gives somw corporation the right to tell people they canmt practice one of the oldest human trades in existence?
So? You can still grow grapes, just not the specially engineered/bred ones. Also, it's limited to 20 years, so you can grow all the cotton candy grapes you want two decades from now.
You can always buy someone else's grape, but sometimes there's only one cancer med.
The correct price is 0, just looking at it from first principles.
But we don't like that because then these "idea products" have no incentive to get made, so we pretend like supplies are limited, we limit them with patents, we limit them with DRM, we limit them with laws, pretend it's scarce so the market can price it.
To many, this is an acceptable result. Buuuut... must we use a market for absolutely everything? Even if it's clearly broken in this use case and we're just pretending it works? The fact that we are pretending is fine, even when someone's life is on the line?
I think we need something like bug bounties for information. I think we need a different kind of market for novelty.
Non sequitur. Ideas generated (/recorded, transformed, interpreted, etc) by human labor or human capital are scarce because human labor and human capital are scarce.
> must we use a market for absolutely everything?
Certainly not, the more applicable question is whether the change we make to the status quo results in better conditions for people. Every economic system has strengths and weaknesses.
I don't disagree with the concept of a "bug bounty for information" but I'm struggling to come up with an idea of what that would look like in a way that is either more effective or different than patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_grants_in_the_United_S...
Pharma grants have their own issues. Our current mixed system with both private investment and public investment allows us to leverage the strengths and weaknesses of both allocation schemes.
That may seem pedantic, but that distinction is the thing we charge for access on.
The reason I'm harping on this is to make it black and white crystal clear, that the existing system we are using is a kludge. It would be shocking if such a system was flatly the best way to do things.
No idea what's better, but there are much smarter people out there than me.
How much effort in the medical industry is devoted to me-too treatments that don't really expand our therapeutic vocabulary? How many writers were focusing on writing Law & Order: Food Truck Inspectors Unit instead of something more distinctive?
I think that maybe we need to look into UBI for creatives: we'll pay you a comfortable living as long as you're regularly producing some deliverables/signs of progress, but you don't get to drag everyone else down with patents and copyrights when you're done. We could probably finance a lot of singers at 50k per year for the cost of one Rolling Stones tour.
I addressed this in an earlier thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761841
Doing any other kind of farming will simply become unviable.
This is way outside my area of expertise, but my understanding is the patent would only prevent others from monetizing the patented technology for x period of time.
That to me would be the key difference. In this case the claim is you can’t even grow the grapes in your own yard non-commercially.
Is it illegal to infringe on a software patent even if you’re not distributing or profiting from the software you wrote?
Nothing is taken away from anyone, the old mousetrap is still there.
I think a better analogy would be: you invent a new mousetrap, you offer it for $5 for only catching mice, but if it catches a rat they owe you $100. The user has to artificially restrict the fundamental utility of the product or else be subject to legal penalties.
"Life, uh, finds a way" and it's morally hazardous to restrict a customer's control of their physical property for IP reasons.
Addressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761841
>I think a better analogy would be: you invent a new mousetrap, you offer it for $5 for only catching mice, but if it catches a rat they owe you $100. The user has to artificially restrict the fundamental utility of the product or else be subject to legal penalties.
I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with this. If anything, I'm for it because it incentives the manufacturer to make effective products. The more effective their mouse trap is, the more money they make. Sounds like a good thing to me. It's not any different than unreal engine/unity charging you a % of your game's revenue as royalties.