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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 would have thought that genetically modified crops would be unable to reproduce by some manipulation. I'm quite surprised to hear from the articles and research linked that this is not the case.
I imagine the purists who want full organic food may be surprised that thier food may be cross-polinated with a genetic crop.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Shouldn't this situation be reversed? The defendant should sue the other guy for damaging his crops!
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Would it be legal for someone to come up with a material that only kills Roundup Ready©® plants?
Can't move to Canada now if Bush is reelected. Is Russia really the land of the free now? allofmp3.com hasn't been shut down yet.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Farmers in the UK are going to have to be very careful over this one. "Organically" produced crops have a premium price here and one of the requirements to be classified as organic is no GM. If a neighbouring farmer's GM crop gets into an organic farmer's crop, there could well be financial penalties if the source of the contamination can be proven.
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So if we ever get to the point of inserting modfied DNA into the human genome to "cure" mutations that exist in family lines, will parents have to pay royalties in order to have children? Will it be on a child by child basis or will it be based on the number of attempts at insemmination? If you have a low sperm or egg count, will you get a discount?
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
I would guess that Schmeiser could sue the other farm that let the seeds blow onto his crops. The "pollution" of his fields caused him an economic damage. He cant use the seeds now because he is not licensed. In Texas,Kansas etc farmers get paid if an oil line spills onto their crop, I don't see how "seed pollution" should be any different.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
Now seems like a time to go organic and provide subsidies for it, rather than providing them for over producing then paying again to store the over produced foodstuffs.
This ruling is crazy and I hope it is overturned. Monsanto are evil for even taking this to court. It's like saying Iraqies are responsible for Americans going into Iraq. The person who sent them in is responsible in that case, and in this case the planting farmer should be responsible.
Even better, the tampering scum that create GM crops should be responsible for their abominations.
Rant over, so feel free to flame me to a crisp.
One important tidbit from this story that the poster failed to mention was that this ruling also eliminated the payment of damages, because the plaintiff failed to prove that the defendant received any additional profit as a result of the use of the patented seeds.
I quote: Since there was no evidence that he sprayed Roundup herbicide to reduce the weeks [sic], the majority said, there is no way to conclude that he gained any financial advantage.
..what we are surpirsed is that 99% of the population has no clue about the food they eat other than it comes from the supermarket automagically.
We've been lobbying against this stuff for years, for that very reason, it infects our stuff, and then they claim ownership? Huh? Howzzat again?
Just wait. If you are just hearing about roundup ready and cross pollination and infection, wait to you hear about terminator genes and cross pollination. Ohh, that's a goody. Makes a plant live one year, then all it's offspring is infertile. Think on that one for a bit. Think about the winds, how they cross borders, let alone mere fields and counties. Give it a few years once they start using that sort of seed, you'll have one company "owning" the planets food supply, then their stuff will get borken and--not much food at all. It very easily could happen, you aren't stopping the wind.
Lotta groovy short term profits though, until that happens.
After that, can't say. Most likely world class famine at a minimum.
I contracted at Monsanto for a few years in Grower Marketing Programs (http://www.fuelyourprofits.com is an example of a project I worked on). To get those seeds, you have to sign a contract with Monsanto, and you would be screwed if you used them in a manner inconsistent with your contractual obligation.
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.
Careful - Monsanto might sue you for revealing their marketing plan without proper authority! But seriously, Gillette figured this out years ago - they money's in selling the razor blades, not the razors.
Even heroes have the right to dream
Or we could declare that all plants and animals produced before 1985 are Natural (as though Noah had Holstein cows on the ark) and everything else is Frankenfood, from which we must recoil in terror. Outside of North America, that seems to be the case.
The argument that GM is okay because "it's only the same thing as selective breeding" is nonsense. Know any scientists who can get mice to breed with jellyfish? Nope, me neither. Maybe those glow-in-the-dark mice are something new that wasn't possible before, then? Yup, I think everyone agrees on that.
Therefore GM technology is not merely a quicker form of selective breeding, it can make changes far more drastic than are possible with traditional genetic tinkering.
Therefore it is not inconceivable that GM tech could introduce changes which prove much more harmful to humans or the environment.
Therefore it is not "pure superstition" to ask why GM crops are being railroaded into mass production while scientists still don't agree on what the cross-pollenation risks really are.
Please point out any flaws in my logic.
Suppose some "radical" activist takes a bunch of patent-encumbered seeds and drops them from an airplane on all the canola fields in Canada. Now, every farm owes massive royalties to Monsanto. There are three possible resolutions to this situation: 1) Monsanto doesn't try to collect (improbable); 2) Monsanto tries to collect and bankrupts every farm in Canada, ruining the entire industry; 3) Monsanto tries to collect, and Canada is forced to provide a subsidy to pay for the settlements, in order to preserve the canola industry.
In any case, the whole deal would be completely fucked. It appears that Canada has just massively shot itself in the foot.
So, anybody got an airplane I can borrow?
All you need is a field or playing field full of dandelions. Spray 80% of it with Roundup each year, covering a different 80% each year. Leave enough behind to allow the dandelions and other weeds to repopulate the field.
A few years of that and tada... Roundup resistant dandelions. It'd only cost $50 per year for 5-10 years. How much did Monsanto spend on research trying for the same effect?
Once you have the field of resistant weeds, harvest some of it and go visit Monsanto and offer to sell them your "high tech" dandelions for research purposes.
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>Roundup Ready canola seeds
FYI... There is no such thing as a canola plant or, by extension, canola seeds.
The term "canola" is a bastardization of "Canadian Oil", used by canadian growers in place of the less consumer-friendly name of the actual crop "rapeseed". The crop isn't refered to as canola until the oil is extracted.
So what you have here is "Roundup Ready Rapeseed", which sort of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
It's not only seeds of bioengineered plants.
With many proprietary seeds, you are not permitted to save some of the harvested crop and plant them the next year unless you have the permission of the company owning those rights.
Do a web search on "Plant Variety Protection Act"
An interesting thing I learned from reading Michael Pollan's "The Botany of Desire" is that apples have a high degree of genetic variation and never come true from seed. If you plant 10 Red Delicious seeds, you will not get 10 Red Delicious apple trees. You will get 10 very different plants, none of which resemble the parent. As I understand it, commercial apples are never propagated by seed - only by cuttings from the parent plant. (Not disagreeing with you - just adding an observation.)
Can you link to WTF you are talking about in your sig?
I've been following this story a while and in previous stories Schmeiser is reported to have been growing heirloom crops also. Heirloom crops are fast disapearing but are important because they provide a genetic baseline that agricultural scientist can use to "start from scratch" occasonaly.
I under stand that if you found the original pre-indian corn, it would be worth millions.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Goddamn fucking antichrist monsanto. Now they have not only the govt.(read piece of shit ugly mother fucker, dumbass, pseudochristian KING BUSH and his evil cabinet), but also the Supreme Court in their pocket. God i have a bloody dollar ripped off a 3 year old that i just bludgened...no sorry guess that is Cheney's Halliburton, got mixed up...
Multinational corporations truly exemplify(ok maybe the bastard abusing military also) what is WRONG WITH AMERICA(a selfish country if there ever was one). They need to be reigned in with tight controls. These GM trials are spreading by cross pollinating upto miles away from plant sites. Pretty soon all of our produce(even organic) with start to have fuckin fish and pig genes in them.
I FOR ONE AM SICK OF IT AND WILL DO SOMETHING DRASTIC ABOUT IT IF THINGS DONT CHANGE!
ever watch the ending to Fight Club? GET READY!
There will be a time when those evil corporatists in power will be fuckin shot with their entrails hung from the powerlines, and their heads put on poles in DC.
"If your crops are aquiring DNA from neigboring GM crops then it seem difficult to call falt on behalf of the farmer."
It would be, if this were a sane world. The judge found that the farmer infringed Monsanto's patent -- the cross-pollinated crop the farmer grew is best described by that favorite term of the music industry's defenders: stolen property.
The seed blew into his fields, crossed with his crops, and he grew "their property".
"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"
They don't want sterile crops. This is a win-win for Monsanto. They can continue to let their "privately owned" genes float on the winds to any field in the world, and it's the world's lookout to discover "Monsanto's" genes embedded in the world's crops. Failure to root out Monsanto's intellectual property will result in an IP lawsuit, with the likely outcome that the sued lose their property to pay damages to Monsanto.
"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. "
How could he have "stolen" the genes? How can he lie? The basic facts are not disputed by Monsanto. Monsanto's seed, patented and protected Canadian law, blew into the farmer's field. He grew the crops. Monsanto owns his ass therefore.
I can't think of any clearer argument for throwing out "genetic patents". This gives Monsanto, or any other genetic "IP" company, the ability to grab land and cash at will.
There is no provision in the patent law to force Monsanto to stop permitting "their" genes to fly downwind and "contaminate" some else's crops, generating criminals by the thousands.
There also is no way to stop the seed from blowing around. That's what seeds do!
I think they finally "re-bred" early corn. I recall reading something about it a year or so ago. The "ear" is only a few inches long and has only four or five rows of tiny kernals. I believe they narrowed down Teosinte grass as the original ancestor of corn and "bred up" from there, just like the indians did. I wish I could remember where I read that...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Careful.
He was not sued for the crops that "blew into his field".
He was sued for what he did the following year; planting the seed from the geneticly altered crop from the year before. The court decided that he knew, or should have known, that his crop the second year around was monsanto's patented stuff.