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.