I'm more concerned about the self-replicating part. I don't want human self-replication technology (aka childbirth) to become patented. Don't laugh, some genes already are.
Considering the current path we are taking, it is almost inevitable that there will one day be a claim by a corporation to "own" a child due to it benefiting from its products and/or research.
I think we can make the argument now that the current copyright/patent absurdities are harming future generations. It's just that for most people, if it doesn't affect them today then they don't care because they are likely incapable of realizing it will affect them tomorrow.
FTA: "The Supreme Court took up the case against the advice of the Obama administration, which said the Federal Circuit reached the right conclusion in the case."
Is there any doubt who's side the president is on in this matter?
Monsanto's business practices are the perfect example of what is wrong with the patent system/big corporate interests taking precedence. They've successfully sued people for cross pollination; engineered seeds who do not produce children; used their standing to get those seeds in just about every market; and they want, and will probably get, their way when it comes to labeling of foods grown with the genetically modified seeds. You brought up Obama's stance on this, but I honestly haven't heard any presidential candidate; third, fourth, or fifth party; talk about changing this nonsense.
good point: i will assume for the sake of my previous comment that good ole' mitt would also take the side of monsanto in this case. still, obama is currently in power, so his actions are more critical than any other politician's stance.
The guy bought the seed from the grain elevator... what does that have to do with seed saving? I can see banning the former but people should be able to reuse their seed.
(BTW, I worked like 6 summers for Monsanto detasseling corn)
From my understanding, if you purchase Monsanto seeds you explicitly agree to not reuse seed from your crop. You have to purchase new seed from Monsanto for the next crop. Which I don't feel I necessarily disagree with that practice. You made the deal so you have to abide by it.
The problem is that Monsanto claims to own the rights to all resulting seeds from their original, forever into the future. This includes cross pollination. So they want farmers who never agreed to use their seed in their crops to pay up because nature does its thing and everyone's crop ends up with characteristics of Monsanto's seed.
The solution is for every farmer to pay Monsanto or ban nature.
Monsanto should be sued for polluting the natural bio-system and be forced to clean up their mess. Soon the fossil fuel companies will be suing hospitals from profiteering from their air contributions.
How can Monsanto claim to own the rights to all seeds "forever into the future" based on a patent? Patents have a limited lifespan. At some point, the patent will expire, and Monsanto's rights along with it. If I were a farmer, I'd be stockpiling seeds for the day Monsanto's patent expires.
Ok, maybe the statement "forever into the future" is a bit strong, but considering typical corporation tactics I wouldn't be surprised if it somehow turns out that way.
One possible way is to wait until the patent runs out, introduce a new version of the seed with a new patent, force all their farmer customers to start using new seed, wait until that seed spreads naturally, start suing again, rinse and repeat.
Monsanto wants to argue that seeds are patentable because they are unique and involve human intelligence endeavour which should be protected. They also argue that GMO foods do not need to be labeled as such for the consumer because they are not significantly different from 'regular' foods. Any contradictions?
No. An analogous example would be if you invented a way to produce an artificial (human) organ (e.g., liver) that was indistinguishable from a natural one.
That would not be analogous at all. An analogous example would be if you made an artificial human organ that (supposedly) serves an identical function, but is different enough that it is immune to certain diseases.
amalag was suggesting that there is a contradiction because Monsanto is claiming protection because they have invented something which is 'unique' and yet 'not significantly different'. The analogy I suggested refutes that.
Your suggestion that there may, in fact, be aspects of Monsanto's invention which make it different from what it replaces does not bear on amalag's original inquiry.
You are talking about having a patent on the method to create the organ, not the organ itself.
It seems to me that if Monsanto can have a patent on a "unique" seed that at the same time is indistinguishable from a natural one then it can be argued their patent covers the natural one as well. Especially if nature takes its usual course where the natural seed slowly takes on the characteristics of the patented seed due to cross pollination. Which cannot be easily controlled in an open field unless Monsanto wants to crack down on all the insects involved in pollination.
Oh yes, make the wind illegal as well.
Based on articles I've read about Monsanto's behavior in this industry it seems they think they do indeed own the rights to soybean seeds in the US.
If the patent covered the process of creating said seed then I can understand. But I don't agree that one can claim to be unique and generic at the same time. Plus if the resulting seed is indistinguishable from a natural one and the patent was on the seed itself then it would seem that the natural seed is the prior art to counter the patent in the first place.
In your example, a proper comparison would be if the new organ is resistive to aging or whatever other common human failing that would cause one to replace the organ. Therefore, it is not indistinguishable from the natural one. It would indeed have a distinguishable characteristic that makes it different than a natural one. Then you can have the patent on the organ. But don't tell me you own the liver of the child of the parent who received your organ because somehow the characteristics of your special organ was passed down to said child.
On a somewhat related note, if Monsanto created an artificial uterus indistinguishable from a natural one, would they own the reproductive rights of the person it was implanted in?
If we go with the current train of thought around their seed? No.
But if they did create a new characteristic for that uterus, let's say it's resistive to disease, and that characteristic was passed down to the child. Then they would claim that child owed them money because that child's uterus benefits from the characteristic of the original uterus they provided.
The problem doesn't lay around the idea that Monsanto owns the seed they created. I don't dispute that. The problem is that they claim that they own the rights to anything resulting from that seed forever in the future, including cross pollination. Therefore, they feel fully justified in suing a farmer simply because his neighbor grows his crop from Monsanto seed and bees cross pollinated the crops.
The best defense I've heard against Monsanto is that Monsanto's seeds are contaminating "pure" or "natural" crops of soybeans. Which is probably where the argument that the seeds are indistinguishable from natural ones and resulting foods do not need a label telling the consumer the soybeans involved are genetically modified comes from. In that case Monsanto wants both sides covered to their advantage; ie, the seed is unique enough to allow for patent protection but no different than a natural one so you don't need to be told that it is genetically modified.
No, they would not. Children cannot enter into contracts. Even if you think Monsanto is pure evil, they would not try that.
The best a company could do is contract with the parents to indemnify the company against the actions of the putative child. But patents will expire before the child is capable of entering into contracts anyway.
Therefore, they feel fully justified in suing a farmer simply because his neighbor grows his crop from Monsanto seed and bees cross pollinated the crops.
Sure, then let's say the parents owe them money then. The outcome is the same. What if the mother is not aware of the contract that the father holds with the company? If we follow the pattern the company will go after the mother/child anyway. Copyright protection has been extended several times, it's only a matter of time before that happens with patents.
I understand the linked article is not about cross pollination. But, again, the outcome is the same. The farmer in question did not go out of his way to end up with Monsanto seed, as I understand it, but Monsanto is insisting the farmer owes them money anyway.
It doesn't matter how a farmer ends up with Monsanto seed. If the farmer ends up with the seed, even if they didn't intend to, Monsanto is laying claim to that seed.
The correct analogy would be if Monsanto created genetically engineered humans who are immune to certain diseases, but made them sterile, and then sued them when they managed to procreate anyway.
These seeds are functionally different from ordinary seeds, and Monsanto is claiming patents on any seeds that contain the similar DNA.
Thus my problems with Monsanto. It just reeks that they knew the outcome of all this and have tried to set themselves up as the owners of all seeds involved in farming they provide seeds for. If they started with sterile seeds that could not be cross pollinated then I would slightly different attitude towards them.
But I would still think it wrong for them to attack farmers who unknowingly end up with their seeds, such as from a granary like in the linked article. They should have to prove the farmer tried to get such seeds through improper channels.
People were freaking out over terminator seeds, claiming it was going to (somehow) spread to other things and end all life on earth.
Monsanto responded by pledging not to use terminator seeds. The anti-GMO crowd got exactly what they wanted. [1]
It's churlish for the mob to claim they were bad for wanting to use terminator seeds, and then claim that they don't have protection because they didn't use terminator seeds.
It seems that since Monsanto's seeds are spreading into farmer's fields that did not intend to have them then I would say the fear of the terminator seeds spreading might be valid.
I would think the anti-GMO crowd's point is that they don't want gene spliced seeds at all in the first place.
This is one of those cases where the rights and interests of patent holders need to be balanced with the rights and interests of the public at large. Biotech crops are probably key to our survival and prosperity as a species on this planet and if anyone can simply grow some seeds and sell them, that will reduce/destroy the monetary incentive for creating new varieties of plants. (In some cases this does not matter, like corn and apples, because these plants do not breed true. But this is apparently not true of soybeans.) That incentive is what the patent system is ideally supposed to protect.
That said, Monsanto's ability/propensity to sue any farmer who breathes in a bit of their genetically modified plant material needs to be curtailed.
Can you substantiate your claim that "Biotech crops are probably key to our survival and prosperity as a species"? There is little evidence supporting that that I can find.
Globally, we currently produce more food than we need. The problems we currently have around starvation and malnutrition appear from my limited research to be centred on distribution, comoditization and other socio-economic factors.
How do biotech crops (current or future) tackle these issues?
That's the most common rhetoric example used in science circles.
In real world, if those 670,000 people can't get enough food to get the basic nutrients, if they won't die from vitamine A deficiency, they will die of something else.
The problem of starvation is of social nature, not technological one. There's plenty of technology to save lots of people in those countries, as they're decades behind.
Globally, we currently produce more food than we need. The problems we currently have around starvation and malnutrition appear from my limited research to be centred on distribution, comoditization and other socio-economic factors.
Remember some "produced food" is fed to other food to make meat. What would you say if vegetarianism was legally required?
That said, it really has no bearing on this discussion. Currently companies do things like destroy perfectly good grains in an effort to prevent the price from dropping due to over-supply. Why? Because it costs money to store, so better to just destroy it. If we come up short later, then it's even more beneficial to the company because the price actually goes up!
That's not even touching the issue of Africa, where most 'aide' that is sent never makes it to the starving people due to political turmoil / warlords / etc.
I'm skeptical of claims that "food problems are just distribution, we produced enough food to feed everyone" claims, especially if it starts with "well, first everyone must switch to vegetarianism... easy!", and would need some convincing that it's possible to "end world hunger" without massive drastic changes.
> The world's second-biggest cause of child mortality, diarrhoea, kills about 1.5 million children every year. Three-quarters of these deaths could be prevented with a simple course of oral rehydration salts (ORS) combined with zinc tablets, at a cost of just US$0.50 per patient.
For years we've[1] struggled to get this live saving cheap stuff to little dying children, and haven't succeeded.
Without any massive change - just a little bit of clever thinking, we use Coca Cola's desire to sell fizzy pop to everyone, and their delivery networks, to help ship ORS.
I am very worried about corporations that are "key to our survival" and incentivized to break the cycle of life by producing species that don't breed true. Aren't you? If not, why not?
Apples naturally fail to breed true. Commercial varieties are cloned via grafting, starting from a single tree.
The popularity of hybrid corn is probably more due to the advantages that come from hybridization rather than any pernicious efforts by the producers. It's not like there are organized efforts to reduce the diversity of the seed stock that is available.
If species always "bred true", we'd all be single cell organisms huddled around some carbon rich undersea thermal vent.
I don't see how human genetic selection is morally inferior to natural selection, nor how human designed genetic recombination is morally inferior to random mutation.
I have no quibble with genetic modification. I have a quibble with a huge corporation that a) sues everyone back to the stone age and b) failing that, is highly incentivized to create new breeds with kill switches and phase the others out of the market.
I didn't see anything about kill switches (for the seeds? although sterile fruiting bodies are nothing new to agriculture, and I can see why they might want to engineer this into their seeds now to avoid such occurrences in the future), although I did see stuff about producing newer hardier varieties.
They only want to sue because this one farmer is producing plants based on Monsanto's design patents (the design being based on genetic composition) without obtaining a license; which is exactly what you would expect a patent holder to do, regardless of whether its a large corporation or not.
I'll be interested to see what the Supremes do once they inject themselves.
if anyone can simply grow some seeds and sell them, that will reduce/destroy the monetary incentive for creating new varieties of plants
This is a similar argument to copyright law, which lots of us hackers are familiar with. Open Source software is software that everyone can copy all the time, and it has certainly been productive and innovative. Does that disprove your theory that without protections there will be innovation? (Or is this differnet?)
It won't destroy all incentives to innovation. Hence the word 'monetary'. But if someone can make billions of dollars from innovating, that will certainly be a spur to do it, right?
If you read that NYT article just yesterday on the enormous drag and waste caused by the current state of software patents, you'd sing a different tune. The log line is "software companies now spend more on patents than on R & D".
These particular incentives are warping the IP system out of control. They have huge downsides and now little upside (unless you hit the patent jackpot yourself and are willing to go sleazy).
It need not destroy all incentives to hurt innovation.
There are different factors in different fields. The downsides of software patents far outweigh any upside for innovation and should be done away with. Same for business method patents and most trade dress patents.
But designing and implementing an effective regime for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or biotech crops, is a different proposition. Unlike software or fashion or business, the products here are extremely expensive to develop and almost trivially easy to reproduce. In the case of pharmaceuticals, patent protection pays not only for the physical development of the drug, but also the trials of its efficacy and safety. (Yes, it's not exactly that simple) There have been proposals for replacing the current system in these cases, but none have struck me as effective or practicable.
The patent system is a wholly artificial creation, and as such, can be shaped to our collective whim. We can throw out software patents and business method patents and all other types of patents that destroy innovation while keeping those types that do fulfill their original purpose. We need not get rid of them all.
If biotech crops are indeed key to our survival then that is incentive enough. No monetary incentive is needed. In fact something "key to our survival" should not be allowed to be for-profit.
Although, I seriously doubt biotech is key to survival. It's more likely to encourage, overpopulation, resource depletion, and push us towards monoculture / susceptibleness to catastrophic disease / crop failure.
Because a profit-based market only works if supply/demand is elastic. In the case of, for example, healthcare, it becomes extremely inelastic [1] - at some point, if your life is at stake you could be willing to pay exorbitant prices for what should have a lower market cost (ie, say, blood at the right time).
Key-to-our-survival is a very strong leading indicator that the demand curve can get inelastic - giving inordinate bargaining power to private enterprises whose entire charter is to get as much money as possible (which makes sense given a normal elastic demand curve).
Healthcare, Energy, and Food should all be places where regulation prevents extreme arbitrage, or those doing the arbitrage will eventually be the de-facto rule-makers. If you want to live in such a society, fine, but I'd rather not. Note: some say we're already at this point, which is depressing to contemplate.
"If it’s overturned, it will have cataclysmic repercussions for the business model in the seed biotech industry," Benbrook said by telephone. "It would basically end the agricultural biotech industry as we know it, certainly for soybeans."
Two things:
1. Someone will still make money from it. Innovation will still occur.
2. Indeed, the industry will change, to a better and fairer one. Oh woe be to humanity!
I was talking about this exact quote with my wife yesterday. "...will end [x] as we know it" is the most fatalistic way of wording anything, without actually stating whether it's a good or bad thing.
Monsanto, you already ended farming as we knew it, and that seemed to work out pretty well for you.
On our farm, we've reached a point where we cannot even justify growing GMO soybeans because the customers are willing to pay far more for non-GMO varieties. If that trend continues, their business model may be at risk anyway.
If you want to get some non-mainstream or non-paid for opinions on this topic, the consequences for farmers in the U.S. and even more in developing countries, also on how the PTO started to allow such patents in the first place watch Food Inc - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc.
Off topic: The snapping of the header into a fixed position on this web site is incredibly annoying. I thought my trackpad was spazing out for a bit till i realized they actually intended for the header to snap down to cover half the first paragraph, losing my place in the text in the process.
dont you love that company... they offer a farmer genetically polluted product that even bugs die of eating (and somehow magically they wont affect human organism, now and in 40 years of constant eating), farmer says "no thank you", then they buy a land around his, put their seeds on, wind blows them on the farmer land, then they sue him for stealing their seeds. By the time the case is closed, the farmer is bankrupt and in $XXX,000 debt.
Its literally like someone broke into your house, raped and killed your daughter and in defense you knocked them off by smashing their head. Then you are being thrown into jail because you hurt that perpetrator and they go free because only you could technically prove they did the crime.
[Citation needed] with regards to "then they buy a land around his, put their seeds on, wind blows them on the farmer land, then they sue him for stealing their seeds"
If you are referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis... then you are eliding the part where "[Schmeiser] 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."
If there was a situation where Monsanto sued and won against a farmer operating in good faith after accidental contamination, please cite it. Monsanto may be an evil megacorp (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Company#1997_WTVT_news...) but evil is not directly related to their GM work.
I think the case you cited is the citation you are looking for.
The problem with that case is in the definition of operating in good faith. If the farmer did not attempt to cause his crop to be cross pollinated with Monsanto seed then it's not his fault that was the result. He may have known what he was doing and took advantage of the situation, but that's irrelevant. Unless it could be proven that he somehow obtained the seed from outside his crop without going through proper channels then he did nothing wrong. He claimed to have replanted seed from his own crop and I don't see where Monsanto proved otherwise. Again, the case you cite is the citation you are looking for.
Granted, I don't believe that Monsanto purchased the land around his farm with the intent to infect his crop with their seed, but the outcome is the same.
The court gave Monsanto license to claim all crops cross-pollinated with their seed as being property of Monsanto. In this case, the court was wrong.
There is targeted evil and aggregate evil. The slippery slope of the above defense in the case is that eventually farmers won't have a choice if they use GMO crops - through cross-pollination and wind, they will be "infected" at some point, and will have to pay despite what they actually planted.
This never made much sense. I don't see what would keep some other company from coming up with a patentable gene in corn, spreading it all over the US, waiting a generation for it to cross pollinate and then demanding license fees paid by everyone.
Heck, you might even be able to plant it near where Monsanto grows their corn for seed and then sue Monsanto.
Doubtful, since the strain that goes to market isn't taken from seed from the external test plots.
I think that if it ever came to that, all one would have to do is demonstrate that the gene is now occurring naturally, and they'd have a bonified defense against Monsanto.
As it stand now, though, most of the farmers who went to court with Monsanto were found to be intentially trying to reproduce the technology.
In many cases that's where I disagree with the courts. Unless the farmer's intentionally obtained original seeds from Mansanto outside of normal means, then I don't fault them for taking advantage of their crops ending up with said seeds.
Personally I would go the opposite route and do my best to prevent GM seeds from entering my crop. But that's just me.
Plus, not reading the cases you are referring to, was that it was actually found the farmers were doing this or that Monsanto convinced the court/jury that this is so? Remember that requirements of proof are much different for civil court versus criminal court.
Most of the cases I'm familiar with never got to jury, the farmers were bankrupt before getting that far or the farmers just gave in because it was cheaper to settle. Which I'm sure is as planned.
That appears to be the case with the farmers though. In this article and with the Canadian farmer some years back, they were both shown to have intentionally taken the technology directly and tried to reproduce it for themselves.
I don't know if there is a court case where the farmer truly had replanted seed of their own with the technology accidently pollinating it.
Keep in mind too that these court cases are closed, and that Monsanto can be using technology to prove their cases - technology which is not public information.
To be fair, this case isn't about cross-pollination. This case is about a grain farmer who agreed not to reuse Monsanto's seed, then bought seed from a grain elevator that had accepted harvests from farmers using Monsanto seed. So he reused someone else's Monsanto seed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the Monsanto genetics be functionally useless when mixed with unmodified seed? If half of the seed isn't roundup-ready, you can't reap any benefit from it because if you take advantage of its one party trick -- herbicide resistance -- and spray your crops with Glyphosate, half of your crop will die.
If Monsanto want their patent to cover future generations of seeds derived from a Monsanto seed. Would they also claim liability if one of those generations had a mutation that caused the plant to be toxic and kill people?
Of course not, that's easy, they would fight all accusations of liability in that case. The banning of GM crops is already starting around the world and I'm sure companies are fighting this "unfair characterization" of their product.
73 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] threadWell, let's hope that if we ever get to have a Star Trek-like replicator, we won't have to "pirate" food and whatnot by using the replicator.
Think of the children!
Is there any doubt who's side the president is on in this matter?
(BTW, I worked like 6 summers for Monsanto detasseling corn)
The problem is that Monsanto claims to own the rights to all resulting seeds from their original, forever into the future. This includes cross pollination. So they want farmers who never agreed to use their seed in their crops to pay up because nature does its thing and everyone's crop ends up with characteristics of Monsanto's seed.
The solution is for every farmer to pay Monsanto or ban nature.
Then you count how many seeds. There's a trespass charge for each and every one of them. After all, their seeds are their property.
One possible way is to wait until the patent runs out, introduce a new version of the seed with a new patent, force all their farmer customers to start using new seed, wait until that seed spreads naturally, start suing again, rinse and repeat.
Your suggestion that there may, in fact, be aspects of Monsanto's invention which make it different from what it replaces does not bear on amalag's original inquiry.
It seems to me that if Monsanto can have a patent on a "unique" seed that at the same time is indistinguishable from a natural one then it can be argued their patent covers the natural one as well. Especially if nature takes its usual course where the natural seed slowly takes on the characteristics of the patented seed due to cross pollination. Which cannot be easily controlled in an open field unless Monsanto wants to crack down on all the insects involved in pollination.
Oh yes, make the wind illegal as well.
Based on articles I've read about Monsanto's behavior in this industry it seems they think they do indeed own the rights to soybean seeds in the US.
If the patent covered the process of creating said seed then I can understand. But I don't agree that one can claim to be unique and generic at the same time. Plus if the resulting seed is indistinguishable from a natural one and the patent was on the seed itself then it would seem that the natural seed is the prior art to counter the patent in the first place.
In your example, a proper comparison would be if the new organ is resistive to aging or whatever other common human failing that would cause one to replace the organ. Therefore, it is not indistinguishable from the natural one. It would indeed have a distinguishable characteristic that makes it different than a natural one. Then you can have the patent on the organ. But don't tell me you own the liver of the child of the parent who received your organ because somehow the characteristics of your special organ was passed down to said child.
But if they did create a new characteristic for that uterus, let's say it's resistive to disease, and that characteristic was passed down to the child. Then they would claim that child owed them money because that child's uterus benefits from the characteristic of the original uterus they provided.
The problem doesn't lay around the idea that Monsanto owns the seed they created. I don't dispute that. The problem is that they claim that they own the rights to anything resulting from that seed forever in the future, including cross pollination. Therefore, they feel fully justified in suing a farmer simply because his neighbor grows his crop from Monsanto seed and bees cross pollinated the crops.
The best defense I've heard against Monsanto is that Monsanto's seeds are contaminating "pure" or "natural" crops of soybeans. Which is probably where the argument that the seeds are indistinguishable from natural ones and resulting foods do not need a label telling the consumer the soybeans involved are genetically modified comes from. In that case Monsanto wants both sides covered to their advantage; ie, the seed is unique enough to allow for patent protection but no different than a natural one so you don't need to be told that it is genetically modified.
No, they would not. Children cannot enter into contracts. Even if you think Monsanto is pure evil, they would not try that.
The best a company could do is contract with the parents to indemnify the company against the actions of the putative child. But patents will expire before the child is capable of entering into contracts anyway.
Therefore, they feel fully justified in suing a farmer simply because his neighbor grows his crop from Monsanto seed and bees cross pollinated the crops.
That's not what the linked article is about.
I understand the linked article is not about cross pollination. But, again, the outcome is the same. The farmer in question did not go out of his way to end up with Monsanto seed, as I understand it, but Monsanto is insisting the farmer owes them money anyway.
It doesn't matter how a farmer ends up with Monsanto seed. If the farmer ends up with the seed, even if they didn't intend to, Monsanto is laying claim to that seed.
That's just wrong.
These seeds are functionally different from ordinary seeds, and Monsanto is claiming patents on any seeds that contain the similar DNA.
Monsanto never sold terminator-seeds. They consciously decided to not do that and instead use contracts and patent law to protect their stuff.
9/10 of the comments on this thread are suggesting that Monsanto should have done the terminator tech, though.
But I would still think it wrong for them to attack farmers who unknowingly end up with their seeds, such as from a granary like in the linked article. They should have to prove the farmer tried to get such seeds through improper channels.
Monsanto responded by pledging not to use terminator seeds. The anti-GMO crowd got exactly what they wanted. [1]
It's churlish for the mob to claim they were bad for wanting to use terminator seeds, and then claim that they don't have protection because they didn't use terminator seeds.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/465969.stm
It seems that since Monsanto's seeds are spreading into farmer's fields that did not intend to have them then I would say the fear of the terminator seeds spreading might be valid.
I would think the anti-GMO crowd's point is that they don't want gene spliced seeds at all in the first place.
That said, Monsanto's ability/propensity to sue any farmer who breathes in a bit of their genetically modified plant material needs to be curtailed.
Globally, we currently produce more food than we need. The problems we currently have around starvation and malnutrition appear from my limited research to be centred on distribution, comoditization and other socio-economic factors.
How do biotech crops (current or future) tackle these issues?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
In real world, if those 670,000 people can't get enough food to get the basic nutrients, if they won't die from vitamine A deficiency, they will die of something else.
The problem of starvation is of social nature, not technological one. There's plenty of technology to save lots of people in those countries, as they're decades behind.
Remember some "produced food" is fed to other food to make meat. What would you say if vegetarianism was legally required?
That said, it really has no bearing on this discussion. Currently companies do things like destroy perfectly good grains in an effort to prevent the price from dropping due to over-supply. Why? Because it costs money to store, so better to just destroy it. If we come up short later, then it's even more beneficial to the company because the price actually goes up!
That's not even touching the issue of Africa, where most 'aide' that is sent never makes it to the starving people due to political turmoil / warlords / etc.
> The world's second-biggest cause of child mortality, diarrhoea, kills about 1.5 million children every year. Three-quarters of these deaths could be prevented with a simple course of oral rehydration salts (ORS) combined with zinc tablets, at a cost of just US$0.50 per patient.
For years we've[1] struggled to get this live saving cheap stuff to little dying children, and haven't succeeded.
Without any massive change - just a little bit of clever thinking, we use Coca Cola's desire to sell fizzy pop to everyone, and their delivery networks, to help ship ORS.
(http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-...)
I agree with you about the "We just need to [...]" school of thought being hopeless.
The popularity of hybrid corn is probably more due to the advantages that come from hybridization rather than any pernicious efforts by the producers. It's not like there are organized efforts to reduce the diversity of the seed stock that is available.
I don't see how human genetic selection is morally inferior to natural selection, nor how human designed genetic recombination is morally inferior to random mutation.
I didn't see anything about kill switches (for the seeds? although sterile fruiting bodies are nothing new to agriculture, and I can see why they might want to engineer this into their seeds now to avoid such occurrences in the future), although I did see stuff about producing newer hardier varieties.
They only want to sue because this one farmer is producing plants based on Monsanto's design patents (the design being based on genetic composition) without obtaining a license; which is exactly what you would expect a patent holder to do, regardless of whether its a large corporation or not.
I'll be interested to see what the Supremes do once they inject themselves.
This is a similar argument to copyright law, which lots of us hackers are familiar with. Open Source software is software that everyone can copy all the time, and it has certainly been productive and innovative. Does that disprove your theory that without protections there will be innovation? (Or is this differnet?)
These particular incentives are warping the IP system out of control. They have huge downsides and now little upside (unless you hit the patent jackpot yourself and are willing to go sleazy).
It need not destroy all incentives to hurt innovation.
But designing and implementing an effective regime for promoting new pharmaceuticals, or biotech crops, is a different proposition. Unlike software or fashion or business, the products here are extremely expensive to develop and almost trivially easy to reproduce. In the case of pharmaceuticals, patent protection pays not only for the physical development of the drug, but also the trials of its efficacy and safety. (Yes, it's not exactly that simple) There have been proposals for replacing the current system in these cases, but none have struck me as effective or practicable.
The patent system is a wholly artificial creation, and as such, can be shaped to our collective whim. We can throw out software patents and business method patents and all other types of patents that destroy innovation while keeping those types that do fulfill their original purpose. We need not get rid of them all.
Although, I seriously doubt biotech is key to survival. It's more likely to encourage, overpopulation, resource depletion, and push us towards monoculture / susceptibleness to catastrophic disease / crop failure.
Why this knee-jerk suspicion of profit? Sure, Monsanto seems to be jerks, but it's not like non-profits never screwed anything up.
Food is key to our survival and it's produced and distributed mostly for-profit - this clearly shouldn't be allowed?
Key-to-our-survival is a very strong leading indicator that the demand curve can get inelastic - giving inordinate bargaining power to private enterprises whose entire charter is to get as much money as possible (which makes sense given a normal elastic demand curve).
Healthcare, Energy, and Food should all be places where regulation prevents extreme arbitrage, or those doing the arbitrage will eventually be the de-facto rule-makers. If you want to live in such a society, fine, but I'd rather not. Note: some say we're already at this point, which is depressing to contemplate.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
Two things:
1. Someone will still make money from it. Innovation will still occur.
2. Indeed, the industry will change, to a better and fairer one. Oh woe be to humanity!
Monsanto, you already ended farming as we knew it, and that seemed to work out pretty well for you.
"Tesla's radio will end communication as we know it!"
You're right, we could do this all day.
I agree on Monsanto, I think what we have today was intended from the beginning.
Can't exploit the hole anymore ? Stop whining and adapt.
Its literally like someone broke into your house, raped and killed your daughter and in defense you knocked them off by smashing their head. Then you are being thrown into jail because you hurt that perpetrator and they go free because only you could technically prove they did the crime.
If you are referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis... then you are eliding the part where "[Schmeiser] 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."
If there was a situation where Monsanto sued and won against a farmer operating in good faith after accidental contamination, please cite it. Monsanto may be an evil megacorp (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Company#1997_WTVT_news...) but evil is not directly related to their GM work.
The problem with that case is in the definition of operating in good faith. If the farmer did not attempt to cause his crop to be cross pollinated with Monsanto seed then it's not his fault that was the result. He may have known what he was doing and took advantage of the situation, but that's irrelevant. Unless it could be proven that he somehow obtained the seed from outside his crop without going through proper channels then he did nothing wrong. He claimed to have replanted seed from his own crop and I don't see where Monsanto proved otherwise. Again, the case you cite is the citation you are looking for.
Granted, I don't believe that Monsanto purchased the land around his farm with the intent to infect his crop with their seed, but the outcome is the same.
The court gave Monsanto license to claim all crops cross-pollinated with their seed as being property of Monsanto. In this case, the court was wrong.
Heck, you might even be able to plant it near where Monsanto grows their corn for seed and then sue Monsanto.
I think that if it ever came to that, all one would have to do is demonstrate that the gene is now occurring naturally, and they'd have a bonified defense against Monsanto.
As it stand now, though, most of the farmers who went to court with Monsanto were found to be intentially trying to reproduce the technology.
Personally I would go the opposite route and do my best to prevent GM seeds from entering my crop. But that's just me.
Plus, not reading the cases you are referring to, was that it was actually found the farmers were doing this or that Monsanto convinced the court/jury that this is so? Remember that requirements of proof are much different for civil court versus criminal court.
Most of the cases I'm familiar with never got to jury, the farmers were bankrupt before getting that far or the farmers just gave in because it was cheaper to settle. Which I'm sure is as planned.
I don't know if there is a court case where the farmer truly had replanted seed of their own with the technology accidently pollinating it.
Keep in mind too that these court cases are closed, and that Monsanto can be using technology to prove their cases - technology which is not public information.