Slashdot Mirror
Monsanto Plant Patent Case Winds On
srw writes "A follow-up to a slashdot story from two years ago: The Supreme Court of Canada is willing to hear the case of Percy Schmeiser -- a Saskatchewan farmer accused of violating Monsanto's IP by growing their patented canola. This article contains more background."
Interesting how they test for the plant - spray the crop and if it dies you're innocent.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
It's common practice in farming to retain seed from each crop to plant in the next year. What Monsanto is effectively doing is denying the farmer the right to carry on a traditional practice. The only thing the farmer is doing purposefully, apparently, is growing from the seed harvested on his own land. That traditional practice needs to be fully protected in law.
And Monsanto is showing absolute and utter ignorance when it claims there is no way for their seed to have escaped in any way. While I can't say whether this farmer "expedited" any cross pollination or cross seeding, I do know from knowing people who have worked on farms in the rural area I grew up in, that such a thing was common. It varied depending on the type of crop. Some crop types could spread their genetics far more easily than others. I do know corn was one of those that was a problem in that area. But it wasn't a big problem in the sense that anyone might get sued because their field got infested from a neighbor's crop. They were more worried that their field might have a mix of different kinds of corn.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Monsanto's claim was originally that he arranged (barter or sale) to have a monsanto-licensed farmer give him some of their roundup-ready seed (in violation of contract). Schmeiser claimed that it had appeared on his land, and he had the right to do what he wanted to with his crop. The (lower) courts decided that it didn't matter how the seed had landed on his land.. Monsanto had a patent on the seed, and nobody not licensed by them was allowed to use seeds with those genetics.
Think this a little further. Think of a second company selling genetically altered canola seed to a farmer, and again some of the seed falls over to a neighbour. But this time this farmer isn't using his own seed but Monsanto's. Then you have a farmer with Monsanto seed contamined by another seed. Which decision should the court make now? Handing over the contamined seed to Monsanto (because it violates Monsanto's patents)? Or handing it over to the other company (because it violates their patents)? Or part it half-by-half and giving 50% to each company? Shall both companies now start to sue each other for violating patents?
What the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is to Moe's Bar.
Both are corrupt in their own way, but the scope of the potential damage, the feasibility of remedying the problem, and the immorality (if any) of Microsoft pales in comparison to Monsteranto. The latter has been on so many people's hit lists for years before Microsoft even existed, and for many good reasons. Just google around, you'll see what I'm talking about. This is by no means the first case where they've tried to pull something like this. If there's ever a "new American revolution" Monsanto should be the first corporation to lose its charter. Boston corn party, anyone?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here's where it gets really screwy - Monsanto is claiming ownership of a genetic sequence which, when grown in conformance with the natural lifecycle of the plant, WILL SPREAD. I don't mean in a laboratory, or an isolated test field, I mean if you throw the seed into a field, little vectors of genetic contaimination (pollen) will spread. You can't get a pure-bred version of the crop, because the plant evidently is sterile in certain situations, but given that the farmer is being charged with having seeds that are partially bred from Monsanto property, it means that the plants can pass on their genetic material to a certain extent.
So, am I supposed to now make sure your IP doesn't find itself into my materials? How? Am I supposed to test the genetic sequences of ALL the plants that I have? This isn't a case where I'm going out and collecting YOUR IP in order to grow new plants - this is a case where your IP is contaminating my plants as a normal course of operation.
For example, this would be like a company which writes a computer program, that during the normal course of operations, spawns a virus that infects other programs on your hard drive. One of the programs that it infects is your compiler. Can this company now sue to get revenues for the programs you write and distribute that are compiled with this infected compiler? After all, this infected compiler now incorporates their IP...
Obviously Monsanto is at fault here. They are honestly trying to argue that seeds can be controlled by humans. Heck, humans can't even control the seeds in their own loins, much less ones growing wild in the wind and water.
Monsanto can't prove that they didn't contaminate his field, and they are shaking in their large, multi-billion dollar boots because a farmer from Saskatchewan is about to bring part of them down.
Why slashdot? Why not?
Now that there is growing talk of gene therapy for humans, these cases will be of more consequence than IP and agriculture alone.
Suppose your body has been subjected some years from now to patented gene therapy.
a) what kind of usage restrictions would companies dare to claim on their IP? Will it be possible that they'll ask you to remove the patented gene from your body if, for example, you stopped paying them monthly treatment fees?
More likely,
will they introduce combinations of "gene therapy+required antibiotics" similar to what happens with crop seeds [when you buy a GM crop because it is resistant to an, also patented, herbicide]. The implications would be that your survival could be at risk if you stop taking the supplemental medications that make it possible for you to live with the "therapeutic" gene. By raising the prices of the supplement a pharmacorp could "drive out of business" gene therapy patients who no longer could pay for the supplement or (more likely) loot the treasury if the patients are on Medicare. Would any representative dare to vote against dishing out funding for the supplement if this vote threatens lives of current patients?
b) What if the therapeutic genes find their way into your children (even if they weren't supposed to). Would your children have to pay fees to the pharmacorp? Would you have to pay a license fee to have children?
In case-based judicial systems current developments in GM patent cases will set the stage for what scale of wrongdoing will be allowed in the future when GM touches us even more personally.
For example, this would be like a company which writes a computer program, that during the normal course of operations, spawns a virus that infects other programs on your hard drive. One of the programs that it infects is your compiler. Can this company now sue to get revenues for the programs you write and distribute that are compiled with this infected compiler? After all, this infected compiler now incorporates their IP...
Except for the virus part, that's pretty much what the GPL does for you, if you use a GPL'd compiler with GPL libraries (such that your code won't work without those libraries) then you must GPL your code. (question 2)
BB