I'm not attacking you here, but the logic decided by the courts may be lawful but it is not moral (in my opinion). It's as if a noisy neighbour hosts a late night party and you happen to enjoy the music. The neighbour notices and decides to charge you for the streaming fee.
Edit for those whose rebuttal is all too predictable: I know this affects the incentive structure for developing new science. But I don't think it's at all clear that the current incentives are actually a good thing in the long run. Alternatives for income could be one of the following: providing a service, producing and selling the seeds, working with local farmers to help them maximise yield from the seeds you developed, securing donations from those who stand to benefit from your research... etc.
I could make up some convoluted argument but… the neighbor conducted the first sale so this should have extinguished any further patent claim. Of course, IANAL.
>A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention.
In this, letting the plant reproduce arguably falls under "making" (ie. manufacture) of the patented thing (the genetically modified plant).
That's one of the stupidest things I've read on this website.
Perhaps you could explain why the decision was incorrect? Or why justice demanded differently?
Imagine where these precedents lead when inevitably we start genetically engineering people. If you yourself carry genes engineered by a biotech firm (cancer resistance or laser eye beams, you can pick according to whim), do you have to pay them royalties when you have children?
If you have a different idea for solving this particular financial problem, I expect quite a lot of people would love to hear about it.
We should not allow patenting of genomes/genes. Full stop. We should rely on those other systems of breeder's rights.
The insistence on IP law being the only probable, legitimate incentive is what's spurious.
A lot of this shit just happens by accident. LSD, Viagra, Penicillin off the top of my head. All had huge impacts too.
It's everything post, and a bunch of overpaid jackoffs and hullabaloo. You're not going to take an RC with an open license to market because there's a billion dollars in intermediary steps between finding it and proving it's safe and effective.
I don't think it's fair to call it economics when all the costs are derived from legal fictions and stakeholder disinterest.
Snake oil, anyone?
As to working the baseline efficacy benchmark is 30%. Not really a stunning number considering it has already been selected as a remedy for something specific at that point. Curatives aren't marketable when profit motive of stakeholders is involved.
Big pharma peddles snake oil, too, by the way. Serotonin theory is becoming increasingly unpopular and SSRIs are looking increasingly dangerous as a clinical proposition, and they're frequently misused in clinical settings. Despite all of that they're taken by 13% of Americans, and the trend points towards an increasing number. Lest we forget: the pretension of safety Pharma acts under has been dangerous in many instances.
There's plenty of ethnogenic compounds that smack against your theory, too, by the way. In any case, to my knowledge, most of these "drugs" are derivative from known-active compounds, altered then patented (sometimes finding better therapeutic doses, lower toxicity, better dose response). At this point the laborious search is relatively smaller. Not to mention it's currently being offset to molecular dynamics which allows us to engineer hypothetical molecules against simulated proteins including those that are dysfunctional as well as model pathways for synthesis.
AZ Molecular Dynamics: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yNGS_mv1-94
Doubly so when you consider that the patent holding company (like Monsanto) has a lot of ability to affect legislation and the (presumably) independent farmer has next to none. The issues here are systemic and not limited to big ag.
Consider the case where the gene edited crops actually implemented a dependency on roundup, and the neighboring farms were forced to use round up rather than did so because it was simply more useful.
The claim that Monsanto sues people for accidentally or unwillingly having their patented seeds sown is simply false, full stop.
It's perfectly reasonable to oppose all patents. Just don't pretend the wind, sun, and dirt somehow invalidate seed patents. There's no distinction to draw.
U take tuber u put it in ground it grows more tubers u try to sell BOOM illegal son .
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Am surprised even need to explain on this forum of coders. Many examples of bad boy software patents.
Here is the patent for the FC5 potato.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6940004B2/en
Read it carefully because while the patent claims that it also would apply if transgenic modifications are added, the variety was developed through just classic breeding techniques, which are described in the patent in case you aren’t familiar.
If everyone who bred a potato patented it, we all suffer as breeders would be limited in what they can work with.
It seems perfectly reasonable to most people that even if you own a patent on a seed that if I obtain it and can grow it I should be able to, in the way that your rights are generally exhausted if you sell a patented part to retail.
Monsanto would lose nothing in case where it was accidental and where the farmer intended it Monsanto would benefit from selling roundup.
Because of this, no plausible damages to Monsanto and that doing nothing is a perfect solution, the lawsuits seem egregious.
I don't understand the distinction you're making. "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them. Do you mean that it's illegal to buy Roundup if you haven't already bought the seeds that go with it, or something?
Edit: I think maybe you're saying that Monsanto has patented the very act of applying Roundup to a Roundup-Ready crop. So not only are the seeds and pesticides patented, but the method of applying one to the other is patented. If that's the case, that's a dumb patent that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
The lawsuit alleged that the farmer's behavior was so stupid that he must have known his crop was Roundup-Ready.
That's not consistent with accidental pollination. It suggests that he deliberately cultivated or obtained seeds that were Roundup-Ready and that he knew his crop would survive the pesticide. Bulk-spraying Roundup establishes awareness and intent.
The farmer was unable to provide a convincing explanation for why he would attempt to poison his entire crop, year after year, so the court concluded he was engaged in deliberate patent evasion.
So now he has a crop that consists of hybrids. These hybrids are all different; each plant is a different mixture of <farmer's variety> with Roundup-Ready. Some of those plants will have resistance to glyphosate. Then he sprays with Roundup; the resistant plants survive, the rest die. Now he has a harvest of seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, but in all other respects are a mixture. These seeds are not the ones sold by Bayer/Monsanto.
So is it the strain that is patented, or the gene?
If it's the strain that gets the patent, then the farmer-next-door isn't growing your patented strain, so he's in the clear. So it must be the gene, right?
If it's the gene, then it seems unreasonable to yell "patent violation" if you're spreading patented pollen over the entire midwest. You must either sell seeds that don't make (viable) pollen, or you have to accept that the farmer had his crop involuntarily infected with your IP because of your negligence.
I thought the GMO manufacturers bred sterility into their strains for just that reason.
Meanwhile, the farmer-next-door now has a grain-store full of resistant hybrid seeds, that won't (on the whole) fare as well as Roundup-Ready, because they're all different strains. That is, having the resistant gene isn't the whole story; you need a strain that is resistant AND grows well AND is consistent. That means an F1 hybrid, and you don't get that by just crossing strains; you have to get into selecting and cloning the favourable strain, growing that strain into a crop, and letting it cross with its (identical) siblings to make true-bred seeds.
Have I missed something?
You can argue that patents of all sorts are invalid and shouldn't be granted. That's a totally coherent argument and not one you'll get a lot of pushback about on HN. I don't agree, but I don't, like, viscerally disagree.
The problem is we have a lot of weird special pleading arguments about this particular patent. The most popular argument, which I think we've done a pretty good job debunking here, is that Monsanto will sue you for unwittingly cultivating their seeds, as if they'll just sort of pop out of the woodwork saying "gotcha! you didn't realize it but you owe us one million dollars!". That never happens. You got in trouble with Monsanto if you quite wittingly applied their patented system, full stop.
Similarly, it's kind of a weird special pleading argument to say that a Monsanto seed can blow onto your property, and then, like, it's just something growing in the ground, man, you can't outlaw a plant, and two or three growth cycles later you somehow have a Roundup Ready seed that is unencumbered by patents. A good rule of thumb is that if you've filled in the "???" in the Underpants Gnome construction --- here: "1. seeds blow onto field, 2. ???, 3. profit", something has gone wrong with your logic. The direct conclusion of your logic is that these farmers could in fact go into business competing with Monsanto selling GM crops. Obviously: no.
Roundup is a herbicide. It kills normal plants. Monsanto sells seeds that were genetically modified to resist it. It doesn't make any sense to spray it on natural plants.
If roundup ready crops end up in your fields accidentally and then you don’t spray roundup you don’t run afoul of litigation.
If you want to do whatever you want with your field, don't enter into contractual agreements where you agree to follow certain rules.
The farmer had not entered into any contract with anyone, that is the point. It's not his fault if pollen from his neighbor's field entered his field, even if they contained "patented" technology.
"Well but you decided to be born, and live in society!" Is not the definition of "you entered a voluntary contract" that most people would use.
Just admit that your initial response about contracts, was wrong.
Instead, you shouldn't have said anything about voluntary contracts, and just said that you support whatever the law says and the governments monopoly on violence, no matter what, because "democracy" or something.
So this part here:
"If you want to do whatever you want with your field, don't enter into contractual agreements where you agree to follow certain rules."
This part is not possible. No someone cannot do this. So you suggesting that they go do this, is wrong. Just admit that.
You don’t need a license to use patented technology which you either bought from a third party, was given or has blown onto your land by the wind.
You can shrug and say "Oh, it was clearly an accident, Monsanto is evil". And Monsanto is certainly evil. It's just reasonably clear why the judge would view this behavior as deliberate and knowing infringement of a patent.
"I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want on my field as long as I don't use pesticides or processing that has been banned by law"
And then someone responded to this by saying that someone signed a contract.
And then you responded by going off about something that is refuted by the original statement.
So, you need to agree that the original response about a contract was wrong, and also that your new statement is irrelevant.
For example, you should not deliberately cultivate a patented plant for which you lack a license from your neighbor's plot of land and then treat it in a way that only makes sense if you're doing that. That will incur liability when a judge notices you are trying to dodge licensing. To put it another way, using processing banned under law.
Monsanto should have paid the farmer for polluting the farmer's field ALONG WITH being required to remove all Monsanto-owned plants. And if that means roundup-ing the whole field, paying for all damages treble, and then removing the living plants, so be it.
The use of Roundup is another travesty.
I get what you're saying from that perspective. It's just BS.
Patented seeds are not something you would have come up with yourself. This is pure envy creating a sense of entitlement.