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Iraq law Requires Seed Licenses
Doc Ruby writes "The American Administrator of the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) government, Paul Bremer, updated Iraq's intellectual property law to 'meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection.' The updated law makes saving seeds for next year's harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, newly illegal. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from IP developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, shared freely like agricultural 'open source.' Other IP provisions for technology in the law further integrate Iraq into the American IP economy."
That's ridiculous. While I do fully support the use of transgenic crops, I find it silly to force farmers into buying something they may not want.
Giving them the choice to buy GM seed is fine; forcing them to buy GM seed and abide by North American terms and conditions is debilitating.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
I hope the Iraqi's enjoy this new "Freedom". I wonder why the US isn't using more non-GMO seeds 3which don't have the IP restrictions?
How ironic, The root of most civilizations comes from the so-called "Cradle of Civilization" which is a region of Iraq located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
How far do you think we would have progressed if the creators of these technologies demanded we use Their technologies and pay a license fee to use those technologies?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
That's not how living systems work, particularly not plants which use freaking wind-blown "sperm" in the form of pollen. GMO genes have been showing up in should-be-non-GMO crops for years now because of this. And the real problem is that in the US, if your crop is contaminated with such genes (even through no fault of your own), YOU are held liable for patent infringement.
Patents convert free markets into command economies and are therefore fascism, pure and simple.
The U.S. regime will most likely criminalize the use of the olds seeds. And even if they do not its only a matter of time before the new seeds will "find" a way into their crops and the patent holders will begin to extort the iraqi farmers. Think its a conspiracy theory? It's already happening. IN CANADA
Be it software or grain, the rules are the same - if you don't like the license, don't use the product - use a competing product with a license you can accept.
You seem to have forgotton about the war in Iraq and the chaos that followed "Mission accomplished".
There aren't many seeds.
Many of the fields have withered and died because there hasn't been enough irrigation, or money to pay the labor to support the fields. Grain houses have been destroyed. Crops have been contaminated. The agricultural economy has collapsed... hard to sell your produce when there are warplanes bombing your village.
The US solution to this problem is to provide GMO seeds, which require a license to use. The Iraqis don't have much choice in the matter... the economy has been devistated, and they need to take whatever they can get.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I don't think you got the point to the article. Most of the advancement that these GM seeds rely on was as a result of thousands of years of selective practices by generations of farmers. That they add in one feature and sell the seeds is akin to taking a large GPL program, adding in one feature and selling the binary without source. The ancestors of the plans that we eat are many times very much distant from what we grow today, GM or not, and that work has taken thousands of years to bring us this far.
when your choice is to use these seeds or starve?
Call me crazy, but I think not.
I know this is /. but the problem especially in this one is that most people here are shooting from the hip and not bothering to read the story.
.. and any changes you make are passed on to others .. who again improve them. This one is about companies getting something that was produced by someone else .. making small changes and then trying to licence it back - license something that was like GPL and not thier total IP in the first place. Iraq rightly IMO had laws against this.
The Story is about the US changing the laws regarding GM Seeds - not the Iraqis changing them. Previously in Iraq (and it still should be) it was illegal to sell a seed and say that you could not save the seeds from the plants. It is a pretty simple principle - you buy the seed, you can breed from it.
One way of looking at it is that seeds always have been kind of GPL - you get them for free
It should be that if GM seed companies don't like the Iraqi law then they should not sell thier seeds in Iraq.
Nobody in Iraq would want to be controlled by a foreign country and have thier food supplies dependent on seeds from that country.
Read the story dudes.
It is this problem that will eventually cause the downfall of the GM licensing rules as they exist right now (note: I'm not saying it will kill GM as a method or product).
;)
... this exactly what anti-GM folks have been saying for years ... once a new gene gets into the wild and it provides benefits, it will naturally propogate. It is called Evolution (except in Kansas and Georgia ... and I get to make that joke since I grew up in one and lived in the other for awhile) and we are most definitely tampering with it.
Take for instance recent studies that show that grain that was grown in the U.S. and exported to Mexico for -food- and not in the form of meant-for-planting-seeds has mixed in with the Mexican corn crops.
The Mexicans did not plant the GM seeds, they don't -want- GM seeds, but now they have them. By some interpretations of the current rules it means that the Mexican farmers (if they were in the states) would be unable to replant their existing crops nor sell the seeds elsewhere because they contain protected IP.
Ridiculous. Talk about viral licensing
The end result is that there is a law on it's way from Mexico stating that any corn imported from the U.S. has to be labelled GM (or GM free, which is rapidly becoming impossible) -and- milled before entry into Mexico. Even then Murphy states that some kernels will make it through the process whole and/or migrate naturally and the GM genes will continue to migrate.
Yep
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
This is not esoterica like software licences, this is basic ingredients for living, and these [insert strong epithet of choice here, my personal best candidate starts with a w] want to control it all. Makes the RIAA and fellow idiots look politely selfless by contrast.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It will be here soon, too. Pollen is airborne. Eventually you won't be able to save your own seed, and they have proven they can control the law and court system to the extent that if the pollen infects your crops, you "stole" their "patented" IP. It's why those of us who have been against this have been speaking up about it. Their plant "IP" law is viral, and you can't get away from it once it's released into the wild to grow. Google starlink corn, canola, superweed for starters.
You cannot both "support it" and think you or anyone else can have any practical alternative. Joe farmer down the street has IP protected corn, you don't, next year the seed you save from your own crop that had nothing to do with the patented stuff will have a certain percentage of "their" genetic material in it. You lose. Every crop you try to grow will become more infected. The wind and the law won't allow it. It's only a matter of time now before global food monopolies. And in iraq you can see they aren't even waiting for it to spread semi naturally, they are just mandating it, showing exactly where they have always been coming from, exactly like we have warned against and been told it was "tinfoil hat" or "luddism". Now here, you see the proof, what they intend for not only iraq, but the planet, as much as they can.
Good post, but unfortunately, your baseball analogy, while good, doesn't reflect just how fucked up this situation is. Because a baseball is real property; therefore, if I throw it through your window, it has changed hands, and by giving you the baseball I have deprived myself of it. While calling this transfer "stealing" is still ludicrous, at least I can claim lost property.
But Intellectual Property, which is not actually property, is worse, because in transfering the seeds to you I have not been deprived of the genes in question. So a better analogy would be me hacking into your computer system, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your files in the process, and installing a copy of MS office licensed to me -- and then reporting the infraction to MS, who sues the pants off of you for having an unlicensed copy. But but wait, it gets worse! I install said copy in such a way that the only way you can remove that copy is by deleting most of the rest of your files in the process.
Obviously, analogies that accurately underscore the injustice of this are hard to come by, because there really hasn't been anything so completely fucked up in a long time.
Otherwise, great post.