> Their business model depends on farmers agreeing to licensing their seeds. Nothing says that those farmers have to agree to that.
The entire concept of patents disagrees with you. If the farmers don't agree to a license, they cannot legally use the invention.
I'll leave it an exercise to the reader on whether I agree with idea of patents on plants (or software).
35 U.S.C § 271 makes it their business.
PC-Company-A signs no license with Microsoft. An employee of theirs finds a copy of Microsoft Windows laying on the ground.
Having no agreement with MSFT, and having discovered Windows "on the wind", as it were, they start to install it on their PCs.
Is it Microsoft's business? PC-Company-A has no license with them, why should it matter?
I ask, because it would be pretty easy to add a jump in the Windows binary to skip the EULA -- Free Windows for life!
1. Copyright would not be involved because copyright cover the reproduction and distribution of content. You did neither. It'd be the same if someone photocopied a book and you found the copy on the ground. You might argue that "well, you need to copy the software from the DVD to the system". If that's a problem, imagine that the mysterious individual also somehow installed the OS on your computer without your knowledge.
2. Patent law doesn't apply because patents (in theory) cover the application of techniques and technologies. Patents are irrelevant to end-users.
3. As stated before, the EULA also doesn't apply.
IMO, applying patents to living organisms is completely bogus, conceptually. It'd make more sense if the genetic information of the organism was copyrighted. Then it would make some sense to talk about unlicensed copies being made, although it'd still be rather tenuous. Copyright wasn't thought for self-replicating and randomly-modifying data. Has a law been broken if a disc undergoes mitosis? How many words would you need to change for a book to no longer be considered the same?
They would certainly be able to do something about that person, if said person would start distributing copies.
Also, question: What if, unknowingly to this person, the OS had been modified to act as a BitTorrent client and seed copies of itself?
We should not be able patent/copyright seeds at all for obvious reasons, it's what people use to survive every day... And if that means that Monsanto will die and the research should be made public, then I'm all for it. No company should have that kind of power at all.
How amazing does an invention have to be before you guys will let a company protect it?
Their business model depends on farmers agreeing to licensing their seeds. Nothing says that those farmers have to agree to that. If those same seeds are available elsewhere, whether brought by the wind or just bought locally, a farmer who has NOT signed any sort of agreement can do whatever they'd like with them.