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Monsanto Wins Case Over Patented Canola
c writes "The Supreme Court of Canada says that you're liable if a plant with a patented gene infects your property. If you recall, Schmeiser claims (and research supports) that Roundup Ready canola seeds infected his own crops. Monsanto prosecuted him for patent infringement." Some other links: Monsanto's press release, Globe and Mail story.
I guess this proves that we south-side folks aren't the only ones whose judiciary occasionally suffers from recto-cranial inversion, as shown by these two statements from Monsanto's own press release:
Monsanto originally pursued this case in the Federal Court of Canada because Mr. Schmeiser knowingly infringed Monsanto's patents on Roundup Ready technology by planting 1,030 acres of Roundup Ready canola without paying the required license fee for using the technology.
Ok, you say he purposely planted a strain of seed whose sole claim to fame is that Monsanto's herbicides don't kill it. But then:
However, the Supreme Court determined there was insufficient evidence that Mr. Schmeiser intentionally made use of the benefits provided by Monsanto's technology by spraying his crop with Roundup.
What? The guy planted this bastardized seed, supposedly on purpose, then didn't do the one thing that the seed is good for -- spraying with poison?
No wonder Monsanto sued. They're pi^h^h upset that he didn't buy the matching 55-gallon drums of Roundup. They couldn't have cared less if the guy used the patented seed -- they'd probably give it away for free if they could force the recipients to use their also-patented herbicide.
I'm waiting for someone to swipe some of these Frankenseeds and create Roundup-resistant dandelions. That'll teach 'em!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
This really does seem to me to be a sticky issue...
It's impossible for a farmer to build a barrier to stop unwanted seeds from falling in. That's why they have to rely on weed-killing products and such to kill off what they didn't plant. Of course, the most common weed-killing product being RoundUp, and this being something designed to allow the canola to be ready for the use of RoundUp, that solution just plain isn't gonna work.
On the other hand, patents exist to allow companies to profit from their innovations. If Monsanto's patented genes are allowed to escape into the wild, then their monopoly privledge is lost and there goes any reason to create such innovations.
If anything, the burden should be placed on the farmers using the licensed seeds to control their plants so that they don't endup allowing seeds to go "into the wild".
This problem is only going to get worse before it gets better. There's a worse case that hasn't been encountered yet. If the consumer marketplace ends up with genetically modified apples that aren't intentionally seedless, then who knows where those apple seeds might wind up. If that modification turns up to be dominant, then non-modified apple trees are going to have a fight with the force of evolution.
Not all genetically altered crops are sterile. To be honest I think they should be. That way it's easier to remove them from the food chain if we find out down the line that there is a problem.
So, wind and bees are now Agents of Intellectual Property Theft.
Give me a fucking break.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Somehow, I think the environmentalist interests are lined up on the wrong side of this football.
The should have been against this ruling. Effectively, this allows the marketers of genetically modified plants to not place any limits on where the seeds containing their genes go. If they naturally blow into another farmers farm and "infect" their crops, then future generations of their crops will by evolution inherit the modification.
Instead, they seem to be supporting the farmer on the "anything that costs Monsanto profits is good for us" strategy. That's just not right sometimes... any financial loss for Monsanto might slow down their research, but it's certainly not enough to stop the company. The goal should be smart regulation, not elimination...
Something that is specifically designed to self replicate, does EXACTLY what it is meant to do and the person who owns the land and air it happens on is the one sued? Backwards thinking, if you ask me.
Lets say, I make a robot that makes an exact replica of itself from simple nuts and bolts. The way it makes a replica of itself is patented. One day that robot escapes and makes 100 copies of itself over at the local hardware store. Does that mean THEY are liable for my ineptness? I can sue them?
In my mind, it should be the other way around, the guy who had this patented crop end up on his land should be able to sue the patent holders for screwing up his property.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I've yet to see a more trollish headline...
Regardless of how you feel about this case, this guy wasn't caught with a few plants that had blown into his field. He was collecting the seeds from the patented plant and planting them himself.
Personally, I think (shudder) Monsanto deserved to win this case. The farmer was infringing on Monsanto's patent, and this case really is as simple as that.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
This "they contaminated my crops" claim is purely for the benefit of the media; he knew that he was planting Monsanto canola.
It's a totally invalid defense against Monsanto's lawsuit. However, it'd be a very interesting claim to persue against the other farmers in the area who pay for Monsanto's patent license.
I'd like to see there be a ruling that says if you use genetically modified products that you have the responsiblity to preventing the seeds from leaving your property.
He should have gotten seeds from his property that didn't contain Monsanto's modification. The fact that he didn't means that he was poluted upon...
So what happens when human genetic engeneering comes to fruition and a company owns the genes that you have in your body? Will you then be sued for having a child if the patented genes show up in his or her genome? Or will the child itself be brought to court as a being whose very existance violates intellectual property laws?
While this does seem a little alarmist, it pays to consider the extremes of our laws and policies before those extremes are reached. It would be a great failing of our legistative and legal system if such a case ever even came close to actuality.
In light of it's recent success, Monsanto plans on suing the Sun, rain and Canadian soil for growing canola plants without proper patent licencing. A spokesman was quoted as saying "The forces of nature must be brought to respect our intelectual property."
I mean, L Ron Fucking Hubbard, how can you ban the replication of a self-replicating device! I'm sorry but that is just plain asinine. Not all ventures in this world are profitable and if I have to wait a few more years for Government funded research to develop this these things, then it won't bother me a bit.
Isn't that like a rapist billing the rape victim for sexual favors? Or an oil company having a pipeline burst and flood a farmer's field so they charge the farmer for the oil rather than clean up the mess? In what sick and twisted Universe does this make any sense? Justice isn't blind it's a drooling moron.
I haven't followed the case extensively, but as I understand it he was planting seeds that were saved from the previous year's harvest. Something farmers have been doing for, oh, say, 8000 years.
He was not, then, planting Monsanto's canola. He was planting HIS canola. That the Monsanto engineered plants were still viable was not his fault, it was theirs. Arguably, he is not infringing their patents because he either A: has already payed to get the engineered seed, or B: it was non-engineered seed that was polinated by Engineered stock - which is not his fault.
If Monsanto can't keep a lid on their genetic engineering projects, that's their problem. And, if the Greens are to be believed, everyone elses "problem" too.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
"It was the seed saving, of known patented seeds that was considered an infringement."
Patents gives one the right to reproduce something. When the object that is patented reproduces itself on MY land, then the resulting product is MINE. That simple. You have NEVER needed a license to USE a patented product. Don't let companies convice you that one does. Copyright people have already come close to convincing the US that you need a license to use software.
The goal of the plant is to grow and reproduce. When it does that, the patented object is doing EXACTLY what the company intened it to do and hence no patent protection should be violated. That simple.
Burn Hollywood Burn
No, he didn't, nor should he have, known the seeds contained a patented gene. What he did know was that those plants resisted the herbicide he was using to kill weeds. You make it sound like the Monsanto seeds are bright purple or the plants grow with Monsanto's logo on them or something. He simply used the seeds from the part of the crop that shows herbicide resistance during the previous season. There was no way for him to know they had patented genes in them.
At least, that's his story. I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't know what the courts could have found that would prove it false....it seems like a perfectly reasonable explaination to me. My first thought when I see an interesting plant isn't, "oh, lookie here...this is neat...must be some kind of patented genes in there..."
Besides, you forget the fact that during this ruling, they decided he didn't use their resistance to his competitive advantage (hence the $0 damages), so why would he have knowingly planted them if he wasn't going to take advantage of the thing that makes them worth planting?
teeker
btw, if some of you think the next logical step is that Monsanto buys both farmers land and start their own company farm, think again, because in a lot of places in Canada (Saskatchewan in particular where the origional case happened), it is illegal for corperations to own farms.
It would not surprise me that the issues raised by this case become so severe, that the Supreme court eventuially overrules its own decision just to restore sanity to the legal system. Here is just a partial list of issues that are raised by this decision.
Do laws and legal precidents dealing with damage caused by livestock extend to patened plants?
Is the "I didn't know" defence become legitimate if it takes a highly trained expert and millions of dollars of equipment to determine if the plant has been pateneded or not?
What happenes if a natural plant is found with the same gene sequence?
what if someone cross breeds a plant with the same gene sequence?
Who is responsible when cross polination occurs in the wild? The owner of the nearest source of the patened plants, or the company who created the seed for not ensuring that is can reproduce normally?
What I can see hapening is that we will get more and more of these restricive IP laws and court cases untill people start complaning too loudly for the clueless politicians to ignore. The poly will then say, "but its out of our hands because its international law and trade restrictions will be placed on us unless we comply." A few years after that, some country will decide that the IP regeme is worse then any ammount of sanctions and change their IP laws to something sane. Shortly after that most other countries will fallow suit.
"Mr. Schmeiser, 74, cast himself as a farmer of the old school who habitually used seeds from previous crops to plant new canola....
He has steadfastly insisted that the seed somehow blew onto his fields from passing trucks or from neighbouring farms...
He said he was astonished to discover that a great deal of the canola in those areas survived his spraying, suggesting that had somehow acquired a resistance to the herbicide. He used portions of the seed from those areas for his crop the following year."
He claims it blew off a truck (kind of like buying a DVD player that "fell off the truck"). Second, he took the seeds from the plants, which was miraculously resistent to Round Up, and then resowed his field with it the next year. 95% of his 1000 or so acres were found to contain this Monsato-frankenstein-canola.
Not quite as simple as Monsato finding a few plants in one field, and sueing him. He probalby woudln't have been guilty at the end of the first year, but the second year, when he re-used the seed, he was.
That's an even bigger problem. Now farmers can't set aside part of their crop for the next season's planting, and instead have to go back to Monsanto (or whomever) to buy more seed each year. Suppose Monsanto has a superior variety of wheat that grabs a big portion of the world market (which is what they're trying to do, after all). Then you have a big chunk of the world's food supply depending on one company and the relatively few seed farms that it operates. Even if the company has the best of intentions, any major problems -- disease, pests, natural disasters, terrorism -- on a small number of seed farms could then have huge repercussions worldwide.
Just throw a few seeds or spread a few spores or spray a special coat of some patented genes on some of your competitor's fields (surreptitiously of course, maybe hire someone else to do it); and they'll lose all their crops.
After all, you can't be sure where all the cross pollenation occured, so you'll have to wipe out the entire crop and burn the field to be sure it's gone. While AgriBusiness could afford to fight this, after all they own hundreds of different fields and could lose a crop or two in the name of competition, small/independent farmers would stand no chance.
seems to me that you should be allowed to take the seed from your own non GM crops and re-plant next year. If your crops are aquiring DNA from neigboring GM crops then it seem difficult to call falt on behalf of the farmer.
youd think that the seed companies would have a real desire to keep these things sterile... otherwise other people will start to do this to develop their own private strains of GM crops... you cant sue them all... but I suppose you could try
for what its worth, my confusion about the source of the seeds came from this quote in the article:
"Schmeiser argued the canola seed blew onto his property from a nearby farm. He has said the plants "polluted" his fields."
assuming of course that he isnt simply lying.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Computer life: Virus - Reproduces and propogates. It's illegal to infect others knowingly, but legal to become infected.
Agraculterual life: GM food - Reproduces and propogates. It's legal to infect others and illegale to become infected.
Big problem here. If the same rules applied to computer life as GM food then I could copywrite a virus and charge my victims... er, customers who become infected. I'd be rich beyond my wildest dreams. This needs to be fixed.
TW
Even if you DO find Monsanto Canola on your land, how the fuck do you get rid of it? It's fucking immune to Round Up!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
There is no global food shortage. There are regional and individual food shortages which are exacerbated by politics. The problem isn't that there's no enough food, the problem is that we can't get the food to the people who need it.
Umm thats has nothing to do with GM foods or organic foods, much like how today's roses have lost their fragerence after years of cross breading, today's tomato's have been breed to be physically beautiful sacrificing taste because at grocery store, regular people don't get tomato's on taste but whether not they are round,red and not bruised.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?