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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."
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
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.
Without getting into details of the patent theory, the 4 most celebrated reasons why patents exist are (according to late Judge Giles Rich)
- Incentive to inovate - back in the 1790s, there wasn't any big pharmaceutical laboratory or Del Monte, so to allow inventors to spend their time inventing and not wasting their talents down the factory, patents were a nice way to insure some subsides...
- Incentive to disclose - the bargain between the patentee and the PTO is protection v. disclosure. Hence, the new discovery is readily available for the rest of mankind, and promote the progress of arts and sciences
- Incentive to comercialize - the patent gives a right to exclude people from using the patented invention, making the inventor the manager of his rights (either licensing to other company or enjoying is own monopoly of distribution)
- Incentive to design around -- Because once you know what is patented, it can give you new ideas. Unfortunatly, it has been struck down somewhat by the so called doctrine of equivalent
More info : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patents ;http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/ipr/pa
However, the US have really blown a fuse here... It is enslaving a foreign country to the almighty US. For the oil, well, I could understand the general purpose, even though I do NOT agree with it. But this is just mean and wicked...
Oh well, 51% cannot be wrong. Or can they ?
Just my 2 Eurocents...
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.
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.
Let's go to original from which you cited those words, and look at the context.
... ... by 30 m. Therefore canola pollen can move at least this distance....9 6.htm
... ... have been too small to capture the full spread of altered ... "It's the longest distance ... Most previous studies of gene flow have been done on far ...S pread+for+Miles-status-25-newsID-277... - 24k - Cached - Similar pages
The issue for Iraq is whether the farmer can save the seed grown once an agribiz claims they have found their genes in samples from his farm.
The answer was no, in the Canadian case.
He said he didn't buy the GM seed and that pollen spreads. Monsanto claimed it doesn't spread.
Current research says he's right.
QUOTE, a couple hits from a Google search:
GENE TRANSFER BETWEEN CANOLA (BRASSICA NAPUS) AND RELATED WEED
www.isb.vt.edu/brarg/brasym96/brown
Genes From Engineered Grass Spread for Miles, Study Finds
gene-flow study
www.onlypunjab.com/ fullstory904-insight-Genes+From+Engineered+Grass+
END QUOTE
Too late for him in this court case though.
Monsanto, because of the legal choice they used, did not get to take his bank account and his farm -- but they did stop him from saving the seeds that grew in his field to reuse.
The rest of the quote you cited is:
"Outcome:The Supreme Court held that the patent was valid and defendant/appellant Schmeiser infringed. However, because Monsanto elected to seek profits as a remedy, and the infringer Schmeiser earned no profit from the invention, plaintiff Monsanto is entitled to nothing."
That's "$Nothing" not "nothing at all" -- and that's the important part.
Schmeiser's neighbors growing the same species bought "Roundup Ready" seed. He did not. They sprayed with Roundup, killing everything but their Monsanto GM plants. He did not. All the plants flowered and set seed (Monsanto should have changed the timing of flowering, to really have some kind of control on genetic movement, eh?)
More from that study:
"Seed movement. Canola plants have small seed (approximately 200 seeds/g). During normal farm operations the seed will inevitably be lodged in farm machinery and transported around the farm and surrounding area. Seed also can be distributed by animals and birds, and seed can be lost while being transported for processing. In the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S.A., spring canola has only recently been grown commercially and already volunteer plants have been observed several kilometers from where they originated."
Remember -- once you know, or have reason to know, that your farm _may_ be producing some seed containing patented material, you're breaking the law if you save the seed growing in your own fields.
Once you know the stuff spreads, goes into weedy relatives of the crop (and back into crops elsewhere), spreads by birds, spreads in equipment tires and harvesting machinery that's taken from one field to another -- well, you know, eh?
and any so-called "infected" crop can easily be removed
Have you ever grown a plant? Or bred a plant? Do you have any idea how stupid this sounds? You can't tell by the seeds which ones are infected. That means you plant all your seeds, and now you have to monitor your crops to see if they're infected. Depending on the degree of the rogue polinaztion, you could find yourself killing sizeable portions of the plants you worked hard to get started.
And what if the infection is not easily visible, but could be detected via genetic testing? Guess what? You're fucked. Not all traits of a parent show up in the offspring.
I can't believe people take the attitude you're expressing here. Do you realize Mansanto has already developed and patented a technology that has been called "terminator"? The technology can be used across a wide species to introduce the characteristic of plants producing sterile seeds. They will bring that tech to market, once the idea of patenting plants takes root. I can't wait until that trait escapes into the wild.
I'm not anti-GMO's at all. But mansanto is one company that consistantly goes too far. And this "ip" law, what's next? Patenting air? This is absurdity and I'm shocked that people don't see the slippery slope this is. Protecting patents for inventions is one thing, changing the rules of nature through law, depriving farmers of an age old right, fuck that. Let mansanto make money somewhere else, don't legislate monopolies into existance. This is insane.
-- the rates are not necessarily low, it's a huge variable, it can be from a lot, to very little, but the bottom line is, if it's in your crop they claim it's *theirs* no matter how it got there.
.. well.. laughable. Junk science. It's ludicrous. If what you claim is true,please, go up to canuckistan and make you an easy billion or more "easily removing" canola superweed for folks, you should be able to clean up with your superior skills and advanced agronomy techniques.
-- plants haven't been patented for hundreds of thousands of years
-- "easily removed" is simply
-- the cost of even testing is huge, and guess who pays it
-- to use the word "stealing" referring to someone who's crop got infected is blaming the victim, it's like if someone chucked a baseball through your window, you had to pay for the window, and they guy who threw it calls you a thief for stealing his baseball and not giving it back, and the way this plant IP law works it's exactly like that. It is pure nuts, unfair, stupid, misguided, harmful, and does not promote the useful arts and sciences, it promotes the establishment of a small handful of international corporations owning the planets food supply.
This action by the US government and it's appointed stooge puppets in iraq is heinous and proves what utter corrupt bastards they are, along with the companies pushing this scheme.
Once again we have proven we have the best government big corporate money can buy. You can approve of their actions, I disapprove, so we'll leave it at that.
Having just read the chapter of "The Law" that was added for the "protection of new varieties of plants" I think I can safely say that Mr. Bremer is paving a new path for our world domination.
By including the R&D of third world countries into our patents (when those countries have no IP relationship with us at all) THEN invading their country and supplanting such arduous unwanted agreements and regulations on the conquered third world country, we guanrantee their eternal indentured-servant status.
They have modified their crops for hundreds of years, and our patents have incorporated their research. Why would a farmer there care if someone in the US used their discoveries for a patent that only affects the US? Now, the tables are turning, and they suddenly do have to care?
Seems like a nice way to make every Iraqi farmer go quickly bankrupt, selling all their holdings to US corporations that are extorting huge sums of money for seeds the Iraqi farmers invented in the first place.
I don't see people starting, but I do see the farm ownership changing from ~100% Iraqi owned to 99% US owned within five years.