Farmers have been selectively breeding crops for thousands of years without help from patents.

However, seed breeder rights are not specific to Monsanto, and not specific to GMO technology. Seed development is expensive work. Breeder rights came to legislation over the past 80 years or so. It is not a coincidence that the Green Revolution and vastly improved agricultural yields started to come about slightly after that.

Interesting! I'd love to read more about this connection.

Sure, and people have been writing books for almost as long. But we still have copyright law to encourage people to keep doing it.

Copyright law is there to protect your specific writing from being used by others, not to protect writing in general. The internet is pretty clear evidence that plenty of people are willing to write without much care as to monetising via copyright.

And the laws in question here are to protect Monsato's specific seeds from being used by others, not to protect crops in general.

Did Monsato create what we know as soy or do you think they took the best seeds at the time and genetically modified them? If we go by the book analogy it's like taking an entire book and adding a sentence and claiming copyright over it.

Like when Sinead O'Connor covered Nothing Compares 2 U and copyrighted her particular recording? She didn't even have to add a sentence!

In all seriousness, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should be careful about exactly what sorts of advances in biotech should be patentable. There is a legitimate debate to be had about how big the change should have to be to gain protection because obviously all new work is based on the past work of others (and mother nature herself).

But I don't think that admitting that we should be careful about where we draw the line means that we should have no line at all. There is legitimate biotech work that people are doing. Hard work. Expensive work. Good work. If we want this work to happen, then it makes sense to put in some sort of legal protection for it.

Be careful not to put copyright law and patent law under the same umbrella. For example, under copyright law there is no problem if you create a work, then after the event you learn that someone else previously produced an identical work. Under patent law, you're stuffed if you invent something then after the event find a patent that covers your invention, even if you knew nothing of that at the time of invention.

In the Monsato case, the patent covers every instance of those genes, whether they came from Monsanto or not.

Here's an article on the differences between copyright, patents and trademarks:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

Your original statement was that this work would not happen at all, not that Monsanto specifically would not do the work. I was saying that your copyright analogy doesn't work for you, because plenty of writing still happens.

Just because plenty of writing still happens doesn't mean that George RR Martin spends years of his life writing Game Of Thrones without copyright.

You were saying that the work would not get done, not that Monsanto specifically would not do the work.

There's plenty of other entities that would be interested even without patents. Large agribusiness would be interested in increasing yields (your 'bigger banana'). Health organisations would be interested in dietary components (your 'vitamin A deficiency'), and it's not like research universities are forbidden from doing agricultural research.

>if you don't give the people that put in the effort and money to do it then it will never get done in the first place

Perhaps the facilitation of some research should be a function of the government vs. a for-profit endeavor.

> then it will never get done in the first place

So... you're saying that crossbreeding of plants and animals did not exist before corporations and patent law? That's just utter, utter, utter nonsense.

There's a big difference in difficulty between crossbreeding plants to get a bigger banana and genetically engineering rice to prevent vitamin A deficiencies.

It's funny you should mention genetically engineering rice to prevent vitamin A deficiencies. That was actually done by university researchers using an EU-funded grant, the terms of which required them to patent it and give exclusive patent rights to a private-sector company. Said company (one of the big agrobusinesses) decided it wasn't commercially viable and shelved it - but they didn't want anyone else making money from it either, so now it's basically useless until the patent expires. They granted a license for "humanitarian use" but it's so narrow as to be almost worthless except as a PR tool to accuse anti-GM activists of wanting third world malnutrition. (Very few of the countries allowed to grow it can actually grow rice, and it forbids import or export.)

To be honest the whole thing was ill-conceived on every level anyway, but corporations and patent law alone were enough to doom it.

Well, if you keep on refining it to maintain that elitist view, why not add "on a Tuesday, done by a Saggitarius who drives a Volvo"? "Getting a bigger banana" also takes years of iteration, effort, and failures.

So now that you're saying that patents should only be for difficult things that takes years of education to do, why did you bother to talk about copyright above? You can write trash and it's covered by copyright. Plenty of trash is covered by copyright, stuff that didn't require education, discipline, or talent.

Copyright and patents are meant to protect novel things; how difficult they are to achieve is not really relevant, so sneering at 'that's just a bigger banana' is just elitism.

Copyright and patents are meant to encourage the creation of difficult things. Protecting novel things is the means. Difficult things is the ends.

No, but that society today recognizes that as worth protecting. People have been writing books for millennia, but now there's copyright.

Because copyright law cannot more important than feeding people and it obviously should not be. You cannot compare other non-essential technologies with farming on the same level.

Intellectual property rights law can be an important tool in feeding people and helping them in other ways as well. If there is less new development without seed rights laws, there are fewer new breeds and potentially poorer development for the whole of mankind.

There is a balance to reach, and I think e.g. Monsanto has reached out quite nicely. For instance, both by law and contract, subsistence farmers may use even licensed breeds. You don't have to pay licenses to grow your own food. You only have to pay if you are utilizing the IPR commercially.

Same is with medicine: new medicines help curing people of diseases.

Your argument resembles a requirement for farmers to work for free because everyone needs food so it's wrong to charge money for it.