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Plant a Seed, Get Sued?
Friar_MJK writes "Now even traditionally non-tech-savvy farmers are getting the rap for piracy. This isn't your grandma's p2p filesharing, but rather replanting bio-engineered seeds. Somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that replanting seeds grown from your own soil is a crime. A company called Monsanto sells those specially engineered seeds, and according to their license agreements, they make it illegal to replant the seeds harvested from a previous crop. To enforce this, they have brought many hard-working farmers to court and even thrown some in jail. According to the story, the company has not lost a case yet." We've had a couple of stories about Monsanto suing a Canadian farmer, but there hasn't been a lot of U.S. press devoted to the issue.
"I swear, it looked like one of mine", exclaimed Ms. Nature, while being being booked. Several scattered, unharvested seed from a bio-engineered crop sprouted this Spring and the Monsanto Seed Police were right on top of it.
Unrelated to this incident, Peter Rabbit was charged with Intellectual Property theft, after taking a bio-engineered cabbage from Farmer McGregor's garden. "It sure looked good, all big and green, but it tasted like wood pulp", stated the incarcerated rabbit.
In other news, to show it's kind heart, Monsanto was offering assistance to Tsunami victims. "As long as they don't try replanting our seed", said an anonymous source within the company.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
simple for the farmers. Don't buy their seeds.
hrm, someone must have been making jokes about the shinnin' again..
you mean shining?
shinnin' boy, yanta get sued?
first
Sounds like the final nail in the coffin for the independant (non-corporate) American Farmer.
fp
they make it illegal to replant the seeds harvested from a previous crop
It's not "illegal" but a breach of contract. There's no *law* saying you can't replant the seeds.
A company wanting to rape the world's farmers for more money! GOOOO Capitalism!
The company selling the seeds is really just upset because someone defeated the copy protection. I hear holding down the shift key on the tractor whilst sowing the seeds works.
Well, they got their license agreements and they need money ofc. How could Monsanto develop those seeds if once the farmer bought them he could replant the seeds grown on his soil? I'm not here trying to defend Monsanto, but I believe Bio-engineered Seeds are the future, and need money to be developed.
What if the seeds fall off the plant, into the soil, and grow a new plant. Does that plant get confiscated? Am I guilty of inducing the seed to fall off and grow?
I know there are drug companies that have patented sections of the human genome, does that mean that I now cannot have children of my own, since I would be illegaly planting my seeds from a previous "harvest" without a license?
Look, this is supposed to be news for nerds.
News is supposed to be timely. This is yesterday's news. Saw it elsewhere in the mainstream media. Don't need to see it here.
OK, farmer entered into an agreement with Monsanto, got it.
Somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that replanting seeds grown from your own soil is a crime.
No, somehow the powers-that-be got the idea that contracts are legally binding instruments.
What's the story here?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Bleh I haven't been able to legally plant my marijuana seeds for a long time how come no one is looking out for me?
The farmer bought seeds from Monsanto, thereby agreeing to their terms and conditions. One of those terms was that he COULD NOT save and re-plant seeds next year - he would either have to buy them again, or use a different type of seed.
He is being sued because he saved and re-planted seeds. Exactly what he agreed not to do by purchasing the seeds in the first place.
Don't like the Terms and Conditions? Don't use their product.
There have been reports of VERY shady Monsanto lawsuits in the past that were really crappy - but this one seems fair enough.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
The company made the technology, the company can decide how it sells it.
If the farmer doesn't like the agreement, they can keep using their previous seeds for crops.
If the farmer breaks the agreeemnt, the company can seek damages -- just like any other contract.
I see no problem here. Go back to promoting piracy and bashing Microsoft.
This sounds like a flame topic, for the most part. Farmers who signed an agreement not to replant shouldn't replant.
Now, if there were cases where seeds had inadvertantly spread, and people were getting in trouble for said seeds spreading to their land and them replanting, it would be different. As it stands, it's a business deal thing.
Farmers who want to replant part of their harvest each year should plant varietes that they aren't prohibited from replanting in the agreement they make when procuring seed.
This is definitely a 'Michael' topic, though, isn't it?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
...the genetically modified seeds are spread by natural means and infect/grow in another farmer's field? Oh wait...they get sued, which is complete and utter bull in my opinion. Shouldn't it be up to the company who created the GM seeds to control how they are spread, or be unable to sue farmers who had no control over the spread of seeds?
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
fsck you monsanto I hope you die a miserable death...
because then 99.99999% of /. submissions would be NN
How about not buying your seeds from them ? If you buy them (or any product/service) from a company and agree to the terms then you are held to them.
And don't tell me its the only option. There are other seeds available...maybe not as genetically engineered or as strong strain... but get over it.
This was posted just to get a knee-jerk reaction from the slashdot masses and you know it.
Here's the deal. The guy doesn't even use their seed. Never used there seed and never wanted to used their seed. The damn seed blew onto his property and he ended up planting it as part of his standard planting process.
I firmly believe that this is absolute BS. For all we know the company purposely put it onto his property to force him to buy seed from them. This is a simple case of treating people as criminal for doing nothing wrong. It's an abuse of power and it's just a case of a corporation that wants to totally take over a market place.
I wonder if soon it will even be possible to get seed that isn't from these guys.
Plant another kind seed and go to jail, too... How about cannabis sativa (or do you prefer indica?)
Assholes always keep trying to make nature illegal. Har!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Of course, suing the farmers to whom this company markets the seeds will more or less shut down any hope of future profit from the agricultural comminuty who are "just fine, thanks," with natural seeds that don't have hundred or thousand-dollar yearly fees attached. Most farmers have it hard enough already just getting enough money to pay the bills and feed the family...
God forbid if Monsanto got ahold of MY "seed" and mucked around with it and produced a genetically enhanced version of me. I fear for all my poor little clones childern being considered the properity of Monsanto. :*(
I may apply this to my daughter.
A blog I run for the wealth
Seriously. Why would any farmers choose to buy GM seed from Monsanto? They should all know how Monsanto do business and the potential consequences of their decision to purchase Monsanto GM seed.
Once you buy their seed, it's very difficult to go back to non GM seed. Mostly just because Monsanto will hound you until they find just one unlicensed grain of their GM product on your land and sue you into oblivion.
Even 3rd world countries are aware of the potential problems. Some have even gone so far as to refuse US food aid because it was Monsanto GM grain that was being offered. If leaders of 3rd world countries can see the potential problems, why can't western farmers?
Shitdrummer.
Not only is the submitter trolling, he's glossing over some important points:
If you buy Monsanto's seed, you sign a contract that says that you won't save seed for next year. If you end up saving seed, you're in breach of contract. Point finale.
If you don't agree to their terms and conditions, you're not being forced by anybody to buy Monsanto seed. You'll just have to be content with other seed that doesn't have value-added traits such as herbicide or pest resistance.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
is "...according to their license agreements..."
While I do not agree with Monsanto's tactics, no one held a gun to the farmer's heads when they signed the agreement to plant Monsanto seeds.
Much as it sucks for the farmers, it's their own damn fault. They should have read and understood the licensing agreement. The agreement obviously held up in court.
...not that I'm a pirate.. Hell I've never even fired a cannon. - oldwolf13
Monsanto is perfectly willing to sell you seed that you allowed to replant, it simply costs more. On a related note, the seed that is not licensed to be replanted often shouldn't be replanted anyway. It is frequently a dihybrid cross that whose next generation is not nearly as robust.
I know there are drug companies that have patented sections of the human genome, does that mean that I now cannot have children of my own, since I would be illegaly planting my seeds from a previous "harvest" without a license?
Only if your parents produced you using genes specially designed by a pharma and you signed an agreement on your 18th birthday saying that you would not pro-create.
This is one of the reasons that Europe became so anti-GM a few years ago (BSE being another major factor). The idea of large companies holding the world to ransom, trying to enforce their IP with 'terminator' genes and the formation of a global monoculture of stable crops do not go down well with most people.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
If they can engineer a seed to resist Roundup, why can't they also engineer a seed that has a lower shelf life not allowing them to be saved for another planting season?
This is the same corporation that brought us Agent Orange..
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It's good that stuff like this happens. Maybe if copyright stupidity hits the rest of the world outside of "those computer geeks", they'll get at aste of what it's like and something will happen.
...is why these farmers are buying Monsanto seed at all. They buy it because Monsanto has engineered their seeds to be particularly resistant to their own herbacide, Roundup. Farmers just dump Roundup by the ton on their bean fields, and basically forget about it.
Sweet deal for Monsanto, and it makes growing soybeans very easy and profitable of course, but where does all that Roundup go, do you think? Can you say, Water Table? There are a lot of people very worried about the over use of Roundup by a lot of farmers in the midwest.
We can enforce our opinions as law when they hire the new farmer-overlord judges. Anyone here with an opinion to enforce?
if a farmer buys seeds from them even once.
just once.
and grows them alongside his own.. or whatever.. then he must buy from monsanto for all eternity after that, because monsanto can argue that there's their ip in that crop regardles...
so cheaper, more effective crop becomes more expensive thanks to force of law.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Despite the fact that, "contracts should be respected," and "R&D investments should be protected," this is still fairly wacked. But it's not nearly as wacked as Monsanto Terminator seeds. Do a Google search on it.
Intellectual "property" needs a fundamental re-think.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Sheriff John Brown always hated me
For what I don't know
Ev'ry time I plant a seed
He said, "Kill it before it grows"
engineer the plants incapable of producing a seed capable of growing a new plant? i buy grapes without seeds all the time? me - not a biologist
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
O.K so clearly Bob was talking about Mary seeds in this song, but I thought it was kind of appropriate anyway.
"Sheriff John Brown always hated me, For what, I don't know: Every time I plant a seed, He said kill it before it grow - He said kill them before they grow." - Bob Marley - I Shot thr Sheriff
--
The last digit of pi is four.
Monsanto is the devil. They are powerful and connected. IIRC they have former CIA members on their board and there was some Bush family connection as well. I also read an article in the last few months that they were trying to push into Iraq. Farmers there re-using seeds for 1000s of years, and trying to introduce IP laws like the USA and bring in Monsanto seeds to enforce this "new way" onto the people there.
Maybe Americans are too slow, lazy, or apathetic, weak, brainwashed, or whatever to stand up to it (I'm one too) while over in Iraq it seems like the insurgency is only gaining momentum and the USA's hold on the country is slipping through its fingers. Maybe a case of dashed dreams of empire, because neither I, nor anyone I know supports this illegal war, nor has the stomach for bloodshed to put our own lives on the line.
But what a fucked up concept. It makes sense from an iron-fisted ruler perspective. If you have complete control over the food supply and the faramers, you have the population by the balls. I think it's too late for the USA. Obey us or starve to death. You choose.
When are these things addressed amongst the world's
princes? Never. Their imagination only includes putting meters on things which were never metered before. Or criminalizing anthing which doesn't send
more money to a corporate hog, capable of neither thought nor compassion.
It used to be that you could only commit a crime against another person. That was in the very old days. Then things got more complex when you could commit a crime against a government. Now things are hopelessly complex - you can commit a crime against an entity that only exists in a legal sense - a company. Slavery has not been abolished, but it has been renamed, and everyone is a slave - it is called citizenship. When you are born it is a crime for you to not be entered as a citizen by your parents. From then on they own you, and you owe them. You will be free when you die. The only reason we don't recognize that it's a Brave New World is because we are well fed and dazzled by technology. It's 1984, twenty-one years on now.
See the related article Open Source Life at Download Aborted.
For example, I buy the seed from the company and plant my crop. I then sell my crop. I then purchase grain from my neighbor to plant next year. But, unknown to me, he bought his grain from the same place I bought my grain. The following year, I get sued because I replanted the same grain. Which I did not... Would I be in violation of my contractual agreement? I can think of many more permutations of this same scenario which all end with the farmer getting screwed once he makes a deal to purchase commercially engineered grains for planting. Must be Farmer Ben Dover.
I realize that the case in question involves replanting bio-engineered seeds, but this is eventually what is going to happen. It's like second hand smoke. You're going to get it whether you like it or not.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
There was a TV show that gave the story about a farmer somewhere in the US midwest who was approached by Monsanto and asked to cough up. The farmer refused.
So, the lawyers walked in and things started to get nasty.
Then the farmer pointed out that the 'illegal' crops that Monsanto was so annoyed about were not actually planted by him on his property - the Monsanto investigators apparently were unable to use the appropriate maps and GPS units to sort this out.
I think the issue was eventually settled out of court.
The most interesting statistic would be how many false positives were settled before reaching court. Not so much interesting as a masure of how stupid corporations can be, but rather as an indication of how much stress and pain that a corporation can cause without any form of justification or oversight.
On an interesting note. They won this case but it actually may come back to haunt them as they are being sued for contaminating the organic canola market and destroying it because ownership has it's responsibilites.
I remember hearing about a story about some farmer who got sued by Monsonto for growing their wheat. The story goes that one day a Monsonto employee tested one of the farmer's wheat seeds, and found it was Monsonto's genetically engineered wheat. But, what the company didn't know was that the wheat seeds from their farm, which was close to the farmers, had blown over to the farmer's field, contaminating his crops. The farmer then counter-sued Monsonto, and won BIG. That goes to show how wild and hairy GE food can get in the wild...
Monsanto are responsible for most of the GE crops in the world. According to the company, the 'own' the patent/property of creating a seed with a GE strain ( e.g wheat, canola, etc ). In summary the world has forever reused seeds for next crops, now Monsanto wants farmers to pay each year for seed, so they reap even more profits. A company like this is raping the very essence of the bio-chain, with their army of lawyers at side to sue third-world countries and traditional farmers. With the WTO on side, people need to stand up to Monsanto and say NO! That means not buying GE food, supporting local farmers, and eating ORGANIC foods.
Monsanto has had criticism in the past for litigating farmers who had *any* GM crop on their land. Still they've been uniformly successful in the courts: it's apparently the farmers' responsibility to ensure no windblown seeds take root on their land.
Someone has finally done it.
Claiming intellectual property over what we eat.
May he lie rich in his mansion after everyone dies from hunger....
First of all, many people maintain that they never used Monsanto seeds. Their plants were very likely cross polinated by Monsanto crops growing nearby. And yet Monsanto is sueing them. Insane.
Second of all, I buy large bags of seed to feed to wild animals all of the time. There is nothing explicit or implicit in my purchase of these seeds that agrees that I will not replant the corn. However, if I were to plant this corn and it so happened to contain Monsanto seed (which I realistically have no way of knowing) how could I be legally lible to Monsanto, who I have had no dealing with? A the very least Monsanto should require that corn produced with their seeds be properly labeled so this does not happen, but instead of requiring it by contract to the farmers that they supply, they have agressive fought the labeling of corn produced by their seed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
When they prove that, maybe it's just. But Monsanto genes spread to nearby crops, despite legal requirements that they not pollute the gene pool. Of course Monsanto has no actual accountability for polluting the gene pool, and it's insidious marketing for forcing polluted farms to pay for licensing, or go to jail. It's interesting that you assume the farmers are all pirates, rather than the victims of Monsanto. Monsanto IP is viral in the biological sense. Imagine if your next-door neighbor's EULA click obligated *you* to subscribe to Microsoft's trusted computing, while you also had to install Windows antispyware, though you installed only Linux on your machines.
--
make install -not war
This is the reason that the US is trying to force GM crop upon the rest of the world.
There was some press about this happening in Iraq - these so called 'donations' where all that corporations ask of the poor english-illiterate farmer is that they make their mark with a shiny pen on a piece of paper.
There have also been stories of this going on in Africa - where big business hijacks aid funding to ship GM seed with the IP baggage instead of the stuff that starving farmers really want - then it's a choice of signing the paper so your children can eat (and entering them into this Faustian agreement) or starving while they wait for unencumbered seed to arrive.
Apparently its an American thing.
http://www.patentlyobviousblog.com/2004/09/monsant o_wins_p.html
Monsanto is growing these seeds in secret locations in Kansas.
Monsanto IP is viral in the biological sense. Monsanto genes spread to nearby crops, despite legal requirements that they not pollute the gene pool. Of course Monsanto has no actual accountability for polluting the gene pool, and it's insidious marketing for forcing polluted farms to pay for licensing, or go to jail.
Imagine if your next-door neighbor's EULA click obligated *you* to subscribe to Microsoft's trusted computing, while you also had to install Windows antispyware, though you installed only Linux on your machines.
--
make install -not war
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to name a few. But I certainly salute your idealisic surprise at the evil that is our current patent system.
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
It was clear the farmer was not just a victim, that he was replanting seeds. The evidence was pretty clear.
This is another case that like the woman and the hot coffee at McDonalds. People hear 5% of the story, jump to conclusions and never listen to the whole story.
These seeds are being grown in remote test fields in Kansas. Locations are being keep SECRET.
Also, for anyone who cares; Kansas VA hospitals are where all the F***d up soldiers are being flown to.
Less people who care I guess?
So farmers are buying seeds through a contract and then breaching the contract. The fact that these are "IP protected GM seeds" is irrelevant. The farmers should buy their seeds elsewhere and stick to the contracts they sign.
Now, as for GM seeds, this is how corporations can try to take over the world using IP laws. Farmers shouldn't support their practices by buying their seeds. Humans have been farming for thousands of years and now suddenly we're putting restrictions on planting the seeds? It's not right and not sustainable.
This exact thing has happened in Australia - trials in Tasmania were negotiated where the eventual protective measure was a requirement that a 5 metre bare strip of earth was required between any trial plots and adjoining fields.
However, here in Oz we have this thing called 'wind' and these things called 'bees' that can surprisingly go much further than 5 metres.
The story died in the press, but apparently the cleanup is a real nightmare.
No doubt that now the Free Trade Agreement is in place we'll see the stipulation that all Aussies have to have the words 'Property of the United States of America' tattooed on our arses so that they can work out who they can fsck up the you know where.
Why has this taken so long to become a Slashdot issue? This has been going on for years!
Perhaps if you'd all like to follow this link and browse around etc, for 10 mins, then perhaps Slashdot will do the world some good.
"People, particularly americans, often confuse what is legal/illegal and what is right/wrong. Please don't."
I got a better question for Slashdot. Why should anyone clear up misconceptions, and provide more information? When we all know that it will go in one ear and out the other. So when the next story comes up, we get to listen to the same mistakes, over and over. Apparently there's a lot of talking (as witnessed by the post numbers). but there's absolutely no listening. I don't know about the rest of you. But I always thought that part of the definition of a geek, was someone willing to learn. Not having to be repeatedly told the same things over and over. Always willing to do research. Now it's talk loud, be a rebel, and speak from a position of ignorance.*
*Maybe the old "/." is dead, for all the people that made it was it was, have been driven off, in the pursuit of "karma".
We need to be very careful with this kind of technology. Things that are successful, in an evolutionary sense may not result in higher food yields. Imagine if some genetic engineering mistake say, over time, had the effect of making all of the world's corn, or wheat, or potatoes, inedible... Or turning the world's people into idiots? Also, I wonder what is the wisdom of allowing patents on living things? It seems really wrong....
"What's the story here?"
The emergence of What You Buy, um, License, Is Not Really Yours World (tm) (c)
License this, license that, none of it is yours. In conflicts an arbitror chosen by the license holder decides who is right. Ad Nauseum.
Not good.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Is open source seeds,..
Mon$anto,..
Micro$oft,.. I think we all know who the real culprit is in this one, don't you?
Then you fall into trap number 2.
Farmers have to buy additional seed. If the only seed available is Monsanto, because the local stockist won't carry anything else, what happens next.
You need to remember that Monsanto is an extremely big business - while their actions may be perfectly legal and open to scrutiny, you need to consider the whole supply chain.
The Canadian court case certainly seems to make it hopeless for farmers that get on Monsanto's bad side.
I definitely vote Monsanto as the single most evil, vile company to disfigure the face of the Earth. The strange thing is that no one notices. Even here, we complain about Micro$oft and SCO, decry the *AA, and put on our tinfoil hats at every announcement from BushCo., but this evil giant somehow slips beneath the radar. How do they do it?
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
I patented the idea of mixing chemicals in my "man seed" to make it more potent and protected from birth defects. I planted my special seed into this hot girl and she breached the contract by having sex with another guy and getting pregant. I'm filing for custody of the child because my special protected seed was in there.
The Determined Mosanto Cornholio Act.
The huge land grap that is called IP has just begun, and its effects ain't pretty.
The more this kind of corporate behavior gets publicized, the better. Sorry for the farmers but I think Monsanto suing lots of them into bankruptcy might begin to make more people wake up to the problems our current IP laws can cause. Nobody seems to care about IP laws when it affects computers and programming so maybe when the food supply starts getting affected it will add pressure for a re-think of these issues.
For a farmer to replant seed, they generally "clean" it. Practically speaking this means taking the crop to a "seed plant" where they run it through a series of filters to filter out the weeds and other impurities. It's then bagged and stored for replanting the following year.
It's now virtually impossible to get soybeans cleaned in most parts of the country. Monsanto has taken to suing seed plants / seed cleaning operations who clean patented seed. Because there's no easy (read- can be done by the fellow running the seed plant) way to tell patented seed from the regular stuff, the seed cleaner could be liable.
Many people are asking, "Why'd the farmer plant it?" One big reason is that he can't get the regular stuff cleaned. Replanting is quickly becoming "not an option". Alas. No more open source veggies.
-jbn
DON'T BUY SEEDS FROM Monsanto.
So how do I prevent my neighbours from buying patented Monsanto seeds and planting them such that they cross-pollinate with mine?
Living in the heartland of America, the farming country, you hear about this kind of thing all the time.
I think this has been around much longer than the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits. I think people just need to familiarize themselves with the different cultures around the world, rather than treating this kind of thing as some big new deal.
You can make noises that the media is controlled by the right or the left. But this is proof the media is controlled by the rich.
This is obviously the story of the century. The implications to access to food is staggering. As well as the future of non-megacorp farming. And yet, barely a peep comes out of the TV or the magazines or the newspapers.
Is it a story out in the farming communities? That's one thing I don't know, given that I live in the city and don't come from farming stock...
Its much like the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of '94. Or the DMCA. Monsanto is proceeding to use the courts to establish a corporate monopoly on producing foodstuffs. They are counting on scientific illiteracy to keep the public from becoming aware of the ramifications.
The US media doesn't dare call the spade a spade. They'll get buried in lawsuits. Just like 60 Minutes & the tobacco companies. And they aren't motivated to report anyway. The public are told that terrorists are a bigger threat to your well being than automobile transport, and apparently they believe it. Its more important to report about Brad and Jenn, or Ben and J-Lo, or one premeditated murder in CA by a white guy.
Ah, I'm going to laugh at you under 40 bitches when you have to give up your life to go serve Uncle Sam and Mobil. So many of you just don't have a clue.
Watch out for mysterious wasting disease and financial chaos wiping out life savings. Those are next on the horizon of unreported news.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
They set us up the balm!
This is one of several big issues that is giving GM crops such a bad name in the rest of the world.
Europeans are well aware of the issue; the anti-GM protesters have used it very effectively to win support. There are stories in the news of non-GM farmers being sued because of cross-polination that they weren't aware of and had no control over, and it has upset a lot of people.
There are African countries that have refused food aid from the US because it would include GM crops. That grain would be useless to a rural African, because the first thing they would want to do would be to keep a portion of it to plant for next year, even if it was intended as food aid (that's how subsistence farming works).
Personally, I avoid engineered food for other reasons, but the legal issues are certainly helping to put a lot of other people off them as well.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Well, if they really want to limit re-seeding, develop an activator agent (is this even posible)?
If you have the seed and no agent, no crop. This would also prevent regrowth through reseeding.
Then again, do we really want DRM enabled food?
Plant 2 Plant Piracy?
Meet new people, and kill them.
These farmers should be sued for stealing the Bio-Engineered seeds. It was the companies money and years of engineering alowing the farmers to have a better seed. They (Monsanto) should reap the benifits of their work as well. The farmers are obviously getting a better yeild from these seeds, so why should they be able to cut-out the engineers, who worked many years to give the farmer a better seed, from profiting off their invention?
This is actually a fairly complex deal.
Farmers do not collect their own seed generally- they harvest their corn, and repurchase seed every spring. That's the way it is done. There is no sense in harvesting corn for seed and it is rarely practiced. If you've got good corn you sell it at price It's cheaper and easier to go to the Coop and get more seed each spring.
The genetically engineered corn is actually the life blood of many farmers- yes even the small ones. They plant tracts of corn that are then observed for the quality of the corn. I lived in an area of TN that Monsanto and others used for testing- you've never sen more curious rows of corn.
Monsanto is engineering a seed that produces better product. The result is simple- a farmer sees that he can harvest the engineered corn and create his own seed for less than Monsanto charges for the engneered product. That would be the only reason to replat Monsanto seed- the last thing any farmer wants to do is more work than they have to, but if they can get Monsanto's branded seed for less, they will do so.
In addition, they can at that point actually sell seed that was engineered by Monsanto for their own profit. Monsanto actually engineers the seed to help the farmers bottom line- to make them more productive.
However, I do agree that suing the little guy in this is pointless. the big agriculture corporate farms would be the major players if "seed copying" ever became a huge problem.
Still, you've got to realize that the reseeding farmer is trying to save money by copying superior product. Call it the genetic equivalent of P2P or whatever you like, but trying to use superior seed to grow it to avoid paying- that's not quite kosher.
The farmers would be motivated though because in this day and age, family farming is nearly an impossible adventure- the cost are astronomical and the payoff risky as hell.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
Seed: Your honor, I've been created by a corporate entity. Surely I have rights to grow on my own accord?
Honorable Judge: No you don't. Now die.
(Judge, Jury and Executioner?)
(1) Pause for a moment before going into "complain about big corporation" mode.
(2) Monsanto and the farmer had signed an agreement.
I think the bigger issue here, however, is the question of whether Monsanto should be doing this. Looking at this situaion from Monsanto's point of view, imagine spending hundreds of millions creating genetically modified plants. You sell them to one farmer. He turns around the every year and replants them. This means you make only one sale to each farmer. Now, it seems to me that Monsanto should probably have a two-tier system: buy the seeds for one season (cheap, but you have to buy them each year), or buy seed which you can replant, but you are limited to a specific number of acres each year. There are additional issues of "what happens to the licence when/if the farm is bought by someone else" (which is why a licence should be limited to a certain number of acres per year). And, Monsanto would probably like to prevent resale of the seeds (otherwise the farmers would become competitors with Monsanto, but with no development costs). It makes sense that Monsanto would opt for the "one year only, no replanting" clause because many farmers wouldn't be able to afford an ongoing licence. While you could argue that the one-year-only agreement is meant to suck as much money out of the farmer as possible, there are two things to note: (1) The farmer doesn't need to buy Monsanto, and (2) the fee is $6.50 per acre per year for soy. For a 500-acre farm (which seems like a reasonable family-sized farm) this works out to a little over $3000 per year. This doesn't seem excessive.
http://www.empiresofsteel.com/
Purely and simply evil. - agent orange - rBGH (bovine growth hormone)
This is one of the issues that switched me to Linux. It caused me to pay more attention to the MS EULA than I would have otherwise done. Reading that, and trying to understand it, convinced me that I wanted OUT!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This was an issue addressed in the documentary film "The Corporation";
http://the1.no-ip.com
(If you like it, buy a copy)
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
There are many issues here. Perhaps the most important is bio-diversity. Furthermore there is not a whole lot we can do about this other than become aware of what is going on and do our best to raise the issues in the public eye.
I have challenged the supermarkets where I live to label foods that are genetically engineered. They cannot of course do anything but the more noise I make the more aware other people become. So this is the little revolt that I am making.
Now the issue is that Rape (now called canola) has been genetically engineered so it is resistant to roundup. Percy Schmeiser had his feild contaminated with Monsanto genetically altered seeds and rather than the supreme court of Canada finding that Monsanto is to blame for not keeping their experiments in the lab the court instead found Schmeiser to be liable for not being able to keep Monsanto experiments out of his feilds.
The logic of this totally excapes me.
The economics of the agricultural community are such that even a minor percentage inprovment in productivity will be picked up by a select few. The consequence of this is that in the long term no-one wins. The reason farm income is low is because from an economic standpoint there is almost perfect competition so everyone competes to the lowest income people can survive on. This is how commodity markets work.
From the standpoint of sustainable agriculture however - this is a very dangerous development.
First off we end up with only selected strains being planted across vast acerages. Next we end up with Monsanto (95% of the genetically altered seeds come from Monsanto) controlling the distribution of these seeds and to top it off we now have an uninformed court ruling that 100,000 years of workable agriculture where any farmer is free to develope any strain of seed is to be replaced with a regime where Monsanto Labs rule the roost.
Not only this - those genetically altered seeds will form some of the most viralent weeds one can imagine.
But - what if we end up with 100% of the farm land planted with a single strain and some biological vector brings in an infection. This will result in close to a 100% crop failure. Anyone who knows of the consequences of the Irish Potatoe Blight should realise what this will mean.
Genetic alteration is not necessarily bad. What is bad is mono culture. When we get a ruling that the individual farmers are somehow responsible for preventing contamination of their seed then we move into a world where a single corporate interest can control the seeds all farmers use.
This leads directly to mono-culture and all farmers are forced into abandoning their individual strains. The result of this mono-culture will be a massive crop failure at some point in the future.
So the judges may have been well schooled in law but they are ignorant of the biology which provides the food they eat.
As I said before - as a lone voice the only thing I can do is bitch and complain which I do. What we really need to do is get a very strong movement going. Even a million voices are not enough. The disaster mono-culture can precipate can be much larger than the Tsunami that just hit SE asia.
Remember this happening in Africa too?
As I recall, Robert Mugabe (I think?) refused to accept gifts of genetically modified corn to his country from the US. As a condition of accepting the gift, he required that the corn be milled, thereby destroying it's capability to grow/sprout/etc, and rendering it impossible for Monsanto and the other giants from having a legal case against him.
I'm really surprised that the farmers are so stupid as to go along with this. Only a few months ago, Wired had an article about the new herbicide resistant coca plants in South America. The plants, as it turns out, were not modified in the lab, but through agressive breading in proximity to the American spraying efforts. No breaking of the law, just simple work. Why are these silly farmers accepting the same treatment? How long before US farmers come up with a soy bean that is resistant to roundup?
I guess it just works out to choice...If US farmers want Monsanto's hands in their pants, they're entitled to choose that. Why heck, as the story points out, it makes farming really easy and feels pretty good at first. I just know that, like taxes, once the hands are there, they're not going to go away, and they'll only squeeze harder over time. Eventually, the farmers will find that they no longer have any choice... suckers...
Roundup completely breaks down into Nitrogen (fertilizer) in a few days.
Yes I wouldn't want to breathe it or for you to pour it directly into my well or anything, but RoundUp isn't like many other herbicides and pesticides that break down slowly and hang around in the environment for long periods of time. Monstanto may be evil, but not because Roundup is some insidious poison that builds up over years and seeps into the groundwater or gets concentrated into the milk the children drink. Roundup is about as safe as chemicals get.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
... but not new. Being an molecular biologist myself, I have been ranting about this kind of shit for YEARS. I mean, what IS it with those people? When gene manipulation of crops, a.k.a. green biotech, came up, we were all celebrating. What could one do with this method - creating crops resistant against various pests, thereby reducing the need for pesticides, creating crops resistant against cold, draught, excess sun, whatever, increasing the area of potential farmland greatly. Maybe even building the nitrogen fixation system of legumes in other crops, completely abolishing the need for synthetic nitrate fertilizers.
What happened outside our overly optimistic minds? Corporate greed took over, corporations like monsanto created new pesticides and the correlated pesticide resistant plants, they had their lawyer draw up special license agreements - and the promise of feeding humanity with less pollution and higher efficiency was broken down to higher corporate profits. I was not a part of this personally, but simply the fact of being employed in a related field makes me bow my head in shame for all this great opportunities given away and sacrificed on the altar of capitalism.
This comment does not exist.
Winona LaDuke has been talking about this for years. Some farmers have even been sued when a neighboring farmer's seed has been blown into their fields by the wind.
Bullshit!
"A company called Monsanto sells those specially engineered seeds, and according to their license agreements, they make it illegal to replant the seeds harvested from a previous crop." Next-thing-you-know..."Oh yes, you can have my dog, but if she gives birth don't sell the puppies!"
Hmmm... and you thought those little "M"s on the M&Ms were advertising? Nooooo...GE candy! Swallow an M&M and Monsanto owns you...
It's far easier to bioengineer crops than it is to say, write software. More geeks would do it if it didn't require patience. The only hurdle would be getting FDA approval, and open source efforts probably wouldn't get the red carpet treatment the way Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland would, but it could have a huge impact. I suggest you target soy, an already hearty crop with myriad uses in both food and fuel (as biodiesel).
.... none, nada, zip. Although pharm co's come close.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Agent Orange is the chemical weapon US used on vietnam. Thousands of civilians have died from it.
I did not install that software it must have blown over from the neighbours and just flown into my c.d. tray .... and then a freak power surge ......
If this was software everyone would understand.
Picture this, a square mile of warez software in a field along side a freeway leading to "Microsoft Headquarters".
If you open a store selling Warez software in a major mall you will get sued too.
License this, license that, none of it is yours.
Too much FUD is going around these days.... anything that kills plants must have some kind of detrimental effect to humans as well. Well, in this case, I think the scientists at Monsanto have done a good job at engineering a weed killer. Roundup isn't just a weed killer, it's a plant killer. And does so by preventing the plant from harvesting air. (like strangling someone)
What if we get a few folks, in their spare time to make just ONE GM strain of a grain and release it under an open license. Then any seed which derives part of its DNA from this patented seed must also be made freely available for replanting.
That and a few spendy lawyers (like me) should solve the problem.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Yesterday a friend and I went grocery shopping, and when she got a cart there was a little broken-off sprig of some kind of decorative plant sitting in the bottom dying, so I stuck it in my pocket to put in dirt when I got home. After talking and joking about this for a moment I came to the realization that all of the plants in my house are pirated. I went down the list in my head:
...she was right!
Devil's ivy - trimmings from my roommate's plant
Aloes - the original broke off the roommate's while I was watering it, so I stuck it in dirt
Two types of unknown leafy thing - cuttings from Grandma's house
"Take Over The World plant" (don't know what it's called, but it looks like something right off the set of Little Shop of Horrors and nobody's been able to kill one) - a friend gave this to me (hi jane!) as a dessicated little sprig and said "here, stick this in some dirt...I guarantee it'll start growing and try to take over your room"
Spider plant - dropped bud off of a sickly, ill-maintained plant at Home Depot (free advice guys, stick to hardware), I think it was on a sort of "I bet you can't make this live" bet.
Now I have to wonder, how many intellectual property laws am I breaking in this rampant plant piracy? With some of these definitely-tropical types, who knows, the mega-nursery all the distributors (e.g. Home Depot) buy them from, who probably propagating theirs the exact same way (cut and root), may itself have only a handful of genetically-unique strains. Will the SPA (Stolen Plants Alliance) come knocking on my door, citing a DMCA (Deliberate Misappropriation of Chlorophyll Act) violation?
(I think the supermarket's on to me though; they've begun copy-protecting their produce. Bah, seedless grapes, bah I say.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
1)Patent Gene sequence
2)Design retrovirus to inject said sequence into human host
3)Retain creative lawyers to write iron-clad IP agreement.
4)Sell to one person for $1.
5)Sue world
This illustrates perfectly what is wrong with "Intellectual Property." Aside from the egregious abuses that Monsanto has been guilty of in this particular case. For example, suing farmers who DON'T use Monsanto seeds when seeds blow in from a neighboring farm which does, going after farmers who break off the deal (it would be nearly impossible to eradicate all traces of the previously-planted Monsanto seeds, so chances are high that any farm which has ever used Monsanto's seeds still have some lying around in their soil, giving Monsanto grounds for a lawsuit), and many other abuses. While unproven, Monsanto has even been accused of "planting" (in both the sense of planting a seed, and planting evidence) their crops on the farms of those who refuse to use their crops.
To my thinking, arguing that "patents" are applicable to any living organism or any part thereof (including its DNA sequence or any portion thereof) is dangerous and absolutely ludicrous. If someday it becomes possible to genetically engineer humans to cure them of crippling genetic diseases, will that person have to later purchase a "license" to have children, and the children, if they receive the modified gene, will have to also purchase such a license, and so on...
"Intellectual property" is out of control. Time to bring it back to reality (max. 5 year length of copyright/patent, only tangible, non-living, truly unique items patentable, no personal use restrictions) or, better yet, abolish entirely the dated and inappropriate concept that a person (or, worse yet, a pseudo-person known as a "corporation") can OWN an idea. This case makes the perfect argument that such laws do great harm FAR beyond college kids sharing a few movies.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
From what i gather the real smoking gun would be the use of their Roundup herbicide. If you planted their beans w/o using the stuff, you'd end up with no distinct advantage over just planting your own seed.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
So, if these plants are property of Monsanto, and they happen to start growing on my land with no help from me...
I can charge them with tresspassing...
or maybe illegal dumping???
What you people think?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. --E.C. Stanton
>If they don't like that agreement, then they don't have to buy the seeds!
Wrong. Monsanto and its cohorts has the market buttoned up. You should say if you don't like it, go get some other job. Organic farmers are pretty much the only farmers in industrialized countries that don't have to buy from Monsanto, since they can produce their own seeds.
On a side note, one of the threads in this discussion is about saving seed to replant next season. Monsanto is essentially doing everything it can to stop the entire world from doing this. Most of their hybrids won't produce viable seed, and now they have IP laws on their side that say if they can detect the DNA they devoloped in your crop, no matter how it got there, you're legally liable to pay them damages.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
You can make noises that the media is controlled by the right or the left. But this is proof the media is controlled by the rich. This is obviously the story of the century. The implications to access to food is staggering. As well as the future of non-megacorp farming. And yet, barely a peep comes out of the TV or the magazines or the newspapers.
/.). The rest of your drivel is not even worth commenting on.
Small farmers are getting squeezed by megafarms, megacorps, the weather, alien crop circle makers, etc isn't exactly "the story of the century". This has been an on-going event and anyone who follows this with the smallest interest knows that there are absolutely no signs of this abating any time soon. Your ranting about the media is a bunch of BS. They aren't covering because, for the most part, most people don't give a crap (rightly or wrongly). Media is controlled by the rich, well I got some news for you, damn near EVERYTHING is controlled by the rich, again, not exactly news for anyone (except of course the editors here at
They sell seed for plants that are programed to die off. They don't tell there customers. Now they are putting people in jail for planting there seeds. The same system works for drug dealers.
This was covered before on Slashdot Monsanto Wins Case Over Patented Canola .
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
the reason why there is no us press is becasue Farm Burea and Monsato are co conspirators in this..
Monsato owns indirect control of Farm Burua..
For those that do not know Farm Burea is Co-Op that provides feed/seed, and etc to farmers at alledgely lower prices and sells their crops at alledgely higher prices..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I grew up on a farm about 200 miles north of Schmeiser's farm. Rapeseed is still grown on my Dad's land. So I have some personal information of the issues and I want to dispel some of the myths that have been postulated here.
A very simple way for the seed to show up is if Schmeiser hauled a load of seed into an elevator for cleaning. This is a very normal practice in Saskatchewan. I have personally done this.
Elevators have rather decent cleaning equipment and it does not cost all that much to run the seeds through.
The issue is that elevator agents will sometimes substitute seed and not tell the farmer. This is so very simple to do and clearly from an efficiency standpoint why not switch the bins instead of making the customer wait?
If Schmeiser hauled a single load into an elevator this is all that would be necesary. He didn't know and the elevator agent also had no idea of the consequences.
That being said - another more sinister explanation is that bees like to spread the genes around. Biological studies have proven that a bee will go to a plant with a different genetic makup for its next load of honey. This is probably built right into the genetics of a bee.
If so - then Monsanto genes would be spread willy nilly all over the place and there is NOTHING a farmer like Schmeiser can do to prevent this. It makes perfect sense that biodiversity will enhance bees' food supplies. 500 million years of evolution will favor bees that maximise the bio-diversity of the plants which produce the honey they consume. Any bee colony practicing mono-culture may well have died out millions of years ago when their food source failed.
...do it. Don't buy Monsanto seed, grow whatever you were growing last year.
What? You find the extra value associated with growing Monsanto-brand corn to outweigh the extra cost associated with buying it, making it a better deal for you? Fine. Monsanto must have made something pretty special there. In return for making that special thing, they get a temporary right to control how you and everyone else use it.
Don't want to have them controlling your crop? Fine. Wait until 20 years after the initial invention, and the patent will pass into the public domain. Then you can use it without fear of being sued.
Bunch of luddites, not seeing that the future is genetically modified grains, wholly owned and controlled by a foreign company who will bury anyone who tries to grow food without permission...
Haven't we at least learned anything from Microsoft about single-source monopolistic controls? And this is food! I'm starting to think we deserve our new fascist state.
The enemies of Democracy are
I can't find a reference to it now, but I think (maybe 5 years ago) that /. had a posting about a new genetic process that Monsanto invented specifically to prevent reseeding.
As I understood it, they had a way to create a crop that you could grow from a seed, but that crop in return wouldn't bare any seeds itself. This of course was great for Monsanto and terrifying for farmers.
The closest I could find online http://members.tripod.com/c_rader0/gemod.htm mentions (search for reseed) that plants can be rasied with sterile male parts. Thank God I'm not a plant, that doesn't sound plesant.
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
http://www.tulane.edu/~bfleury/envirobio/enviroweb /DeadZone.htm
http://www.tulane.edu/~bfleury/envirobio/enviroweb /DeadZone.htm
Posting this logged in so maybe someone will see it.
This is absolutely sick! Seeds float through the air, and when they land, they grow into plants, by their very nature!
That's like if I were to write a computer worm, then sue people who get infected by it for violating the terms under which I license it!
This is pure evil.
Wouldn't the fact that crop of the following year couldn't be identical to the previous year due to genetic variation brought up through the normal cycle of pollenation? The same process that the GM company used to "breed" their super strain of crop?
Seeing that the genetic makeup of the crop has to be somewhat different, all the GM company could claim would be that fractured pieces of their copyrighted genetic code remained in the new crop. This is the case however anyhoe, look hard enough and you'll find that the particular genetic sequence that makes their crop so good is probably out ther in some other non human manipulated form, and thus you could say that there are prior cases of the copyrighted material which would null and void their claim.
Under law set by L. Paul Bremer (still in force so far as I know). Iraqi farmers are required to buy Licences from Monsanto before growing crops. They are, in fact forced to use genetically engineerd (and thus patented and copyrighted) seeds. Read it on /..
No, we're talking about the farmer who did everything the way he always has, saving seed from one year to the next, rotating his crops through different fields, etc. Then one say he gets slapped with a lawsuit because one of Monsanto's ninjas slipped over the fence and took samples of his crops, which, when analyzed, showed the genetic nametags Monsanto had sewed onto the corn's waistband. And the farmer loses his crop or his entire farm. Monsanto should have to sue the wind and the King of the Insects, they're the ones who took the pollen from one field to another.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
So what is one supposed to use to kill these Monsanto weeds, once they have infested your property?
Oh well, what the hell...
Thus make them pay you to clean up their mess...
every year.
First off, virtually all corn planted in the US is hybred. That means the seeds have to be grown in dedicated fields with the two types of parent corn planted next to eachother, and workers go out and pull all the tasels off the 'female' plants so that they cant selfpolinate and produce only seeds with the male plants as the polinator. the male plants are then killed and the female plants are harvested at the end of the season. They are seeds for planting. The plants they grow produce far more yeild, on stronger healthier plants with less fertilizer and pesticides then any other variety that is self polinating. So farmers buy these seeds and plant them. And they get great yields. But if they were to replant the yield, they would get sickly weak, low producing plants. Nobody plants self polinated corn, only hybred. And the only fields that need to worry about contamination are the hybred fields OWNED BY THE SEED COMPANY! They plant just plant beans around them.
Beans are different. Beans are not hybreds because its just not economical to industrially produce hybred seeds. Beans self polinate, and ONLY SELF POLINATE! Its impossible to get your beans contiminated fron your neighbor's field because they dont disperse pollen. Each flower is contained, and they are not polinated by wind, nor insects. Its impossible to have pollen contamination unless you intentionally do it. This involves getting on your knees with a tiny brush and cutting off the stamen of the mother flower and then brushing on pollen colledted from a father plant flower on the pistil of the mother flower. This single flower will then produce a pod of beans containing a grand total of 3 seeds. You can do it in a lab and it only takes a few hours per plant (1 hour per 100 seeds). But because the plants are selfpolinating, the seeds from a normal farmer's crop are all true. He could simply replant them and never pay the money that was spend to develop the plant. (thousands of tries of combinations of plants crossbreeding them in a lab for an incredible amount of work. So the seed companies require famers not to replant their patented seeds. Some may want to anyway, and like any other form of illegial copying, the companies does, and has the legal right to, prosecute the copyright infringment.
I'm going back in time and introducing intellectual property rights to the ancient mesoamericans. No more "we own all your corn now" bull from the biocorps; you pay the New Aztec Empire, or you JUST DON'T EAT.
/. maybe I'll just open source maise. Problem solved for everyone. (But what license? LGPL?)
No more farmer-crushing works derived from free maise in the 21st century. No more feeding Europe and Asia for centuries at practically no cost. Mexico's economy will retroactively have gone through the roof.
Or.. geez, this being
Note to self: remember to bring along a case of small pox vaccine.
It's less toxic than nearly any other herbicide. Why? Because it isn't a harsh chemical, it is an acting organic compound. It doesn't affect animals at all for example. And it breaks down, unlike various weed killers you'll find.
You'd much rather these people use this instead of other herbicides.
Stop spreading FUD.
anyway, usually the seeds are sterilized before being sold to the farmers.
This issue affects every single human on the planet. Namely, the fact that the very food they eat may be one day controlled by multinational food giants such as monsanto, adm, etc..
So you have court rulings indicating culpability (only guessing because i did not rtfa) of the farmer in cases where there was natural cross pollination has occurred with Monsanto gm seeds. I could see how in some scenario, Monsanto could have set this up on purpose to guarantee their gm rights in the US and of course in the world through our trade bodies, but that's just a possibility.
Growing food is one of the most basic aspects of a civilized society. It allowed us to move from a primarily nomadic pastoral society to a sedentary agrarian one. It is the very foundation for how we live our lives. For 3/4 of humanity, their food is grown locally by small family farms. These farmers must be able to use seed from year to year because their margins are incredibly small. Without that, they cannot continue.
Now...think about it. These guargantuan food multinationals want power. Well..how the heck can they break into these small isolated markets when the farmers own all the land? By genetically altering the plants they grow to make them grow better/faster/stronger and resist local pests/pesticides. Of course this "seems" better to the farmers, the plants "appear" to be incredible.
However, this smoke and mirrors act shows itself very quickly.
Firstly, these genetic strains actually reinforce the very agents they are supposed to fight. It's kind of a species war. These plants can fight all the pests/pesticides for quite a few generations. But, at some point a bug will mutate to be able to get past that defence. Then of course it will be able to spread easily because the rest of the non-adaptive population will die out.
Secondly, and even more insidiously, these companies then control subsequent plantings. This is terrible, because these farmers, who often have to take out a loan anyway to get the seed, now have completely lost their margin. They may grow a bit more, but the markets they sell to are small localized and balanced, and cannot easily make up for the additional capital costs. They very well could disrupt local markets. Now that farmer has lost rights to his own seed, he is beholden to a company every year for his livelyhood.
Thirdly, since the farmer must now buy seed every year from the company, the seed does not get the generational ontological adapations required for each region and indeed each plot of land. The seed will never be "his" because each batch will have to be new. This is VERY bad, because as i mentioned before, if a predator comes that circumvents its defences, it will not have the strength and stability that many generations of growth would give it. As another poster mentioned, the monoclonal kill-off so to speak.
Lastly you have the coup-de-gras, that a company's reach could extend to a method plants use naturally to ensure diversity and strength, namely pollination. This process is basically Darwin's evolution for plants. It really is what ensure's that the earth's plants adapt and become stronger with each generation. Monsanto can now sue a farmer for cross-pollination from a contracted neighbor. Doesnt seem very likely that any peasant farmer could stand up against Monsanto, so what happens? THEY LOSE THEIR FARM. Hmm...wonder who would be interested in buying it..maybe MONSANTO?
This is, pure and simple, corporate evil in it's purest form. Monsanto pays millions of dollars a year to lobbyists who go to Washington to fight bills regulating gm products. We need to voice our support to our elected officials for gm regulation and control. Let them know that we value the family farm, the sanctity of millenia old farming practices throughout the world, and the power of farms to keep control of their own generations of seed. The quality of life of every human being depends upon these innate basic rights.
Let's hope foreign governments are able
They'll sue your for having grandchildren.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Companies like monsanto are developing seeds that when grown will produce grains/seeds not capable of growing. No seed can be reused, & the farmer is tied to the seed supplier for good.
but that "don't buy it if you don't like it" argument becomes quickly untenable when every manufacturer of every similar type of product has the same terms.
+++ATH0
If I'm a subsistance farmer (growing food to feed me and my family, not to sell) will that fall under some personal use clause similar to allowing me to make duplicates of my CDs?
In any case, F1 progeny of many genetically engineered crops are essentially sterile.
As far as the issue of somehow owning genes go, well, genes can and do travel by themselves in nature. For example a few years ago very small percentages of the seed canola grown on my farm did test positive for the Monsanto gene. This monsanto variety had never been grown before on my land. The nearest field was over 4 miles away and several years previous. Yet the gene persisted somehow and was introduced into my crop. So obviously Monsanto can't hope to keep control over this gene in the long run. But they can badger farmers in the short run.
On another note, much of Monsanto's seed development includes the creation of roundup-ready plants, as well as creating crops that cannot reproduce. I'm not terribly afraid of GMO, but I think we should really think seriously about what Monsanto is doing. If, on one hand, we produce crops that are resistant to the only herbicide that kills every thing then we are pretty much creating a super weed. On the other hand, if we make seed sterile, then we are locking many developing nations into being forced to buy seed every year. Then to sue people to boot... I think hard questions need to be asked of chemical companies in general, and genetic manipulation of our crops.
.. but don't you think this is exactly the kind of thing that we just have to take from the people who developed it and give to all mankind ??
I mean really.. can we honestly sit back and allow a corporation to dictate the terms of survival.. to put a cash value.. to look for shareholder value from developments that might conceivably raise such a large proportion of the the world out of subsistence poverty... ?
And why aren't our governments beating these guys to these kind of developments anyway ? We just put a probe on a moon a gazillion miles away.. why aren't we throwing the same kind of money into a more nutritous grain of rice for everyone down here.. open source genes..
Monsanto always make me thing of the moneylender in the Merchant of Venice:
;)
The moneylender can take one pound of flesh without blood or hair, from the borrower.
Similarly, Monsanto should be able to the protect its magic gene, but not anything more.
If they can enforce their IP just to that gene but not anything else go for it. They are overly greedy and ignore (or forget) the fact that 99.99999% of the plant is contributed by the mother nature and generations of farmers who adopt the selective breeding technique (keep only the seed from a good and strong plant). To me it is a bit like adding a proprietary extension to Linux and claim the whole lot belong to yours. So sad that God forgets to sign GPL with Man
People Freaked Out about the terminator gene over this 19th century public understanding of farming that farmers actually save seed and replant. Many reasons this is not common, hybrids don't produce true seed, chemically treated seed, etc.
They sued an old man who tested to see if his canola seed (non-Monsanto variety) contained traces of the Roundup Ready canola variety, by spraying a small section with Round-up. It lived, and thus contained Monsanto's patented genetics. He did not ever plant this variety, but instead had gotten these traits from windblown pollen in previous years, from others' fields.
However, it was ruled that he's responsible for these traits appearing in his field, despite never using them, and not having a way to prevent them from appearing. He can't control pollen travelling through the air anymore than anyone else. But he's still responsible for some stupid reason.
However, I don't think this would fly in the US. Why? Well, first of all, Canadians tend to do this type of litigation. You know how there's a premium for CD-R's, DVD-R's and other recordable media that is paid to artists, with the assumption that piracy will occur? Well, it's pretty much the same deal here, and will end up the same way such litigation and legislation has in the US.
Actually this is corporate fascism is it not? Not quite communism...
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
1. Create GM version of common crop and patent.
2. Be sure plant is extremely hearty and aggressive.
3. Let new plant wipe out all natural competition.
4. Profit
There is a really good video about GeneMod food here: http://www.gnn.tv/videos/viewer.php?id=21&spd=hi
Reading the comments on this article makes me despair. This farmer is not being sued for patent infringement or any other IP law violation. He is being sued for breach of contract. He bought Monsanto seed, planted it then planted the seeds from the resulting crop. He also agreed to a CONTRACT with Monsanto that he would not do this. It is not a case of wind-blown pollination resulting in a legal action for patent infringement. It is a simple case of somebody breaking a freely entered into contract and getting sued for it.
Come up with a story of a farmer being sued for the results of accidental polination under patent law and then you might have something to complain about. This isn't it.
Apparently a farmer next to another field who used one of these seeds had a couple crops come up along side the road on his farm. He was then sued for unlicensed seeds, even though they where grown via natural scatter (wind, birds, etc).
So does this mean farmers are starting to feel the same patent problems of the software industry? IT's funny, while companies have to dig threw all of their code and spend millions making sure they're not "re-inventing/using" something that some random company might have patented... farmers might literally have to walk around their entire farm checking each plant to see if it's not bio-patented.
If anything this gives a great example of how messed up the whole patent system is, if you needed to describe it to someone else.
I can well imagine Monsanto has long since joined in the corporate chorus crying for tort "reform" to protect themselves from any suits from John Q. Littleguy if there's some adverse effect or other from their "Frankenfood".
It's been public knowpedge that Monsanto has done this for years. They create poison-resistant strains so as to better produce yields from nutrient-stripped toxic soil. They sue into oblivion those who even accidentally use their seed (through cross-pollination).
They are also part of the group behind suing dairy farmers and packagers who actually have the audacity to advertise that they don't use rBGH in their cows. Thanks to American jurisprudence, they have been successful in Vermont, Texas, and several other states in preventing companies and individual farmers from advertising a FACT that many people find particularly salient in their purchasing decisions.
I just hope my dad hasn't produced me under one of those contracts. We're expecting a kid and now I'm scared!
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
In the late 19th century, more than a million Irish diead because their entire food structure was built on a specific breed of potato. All of those potatoes died, and so did a bunch of Irishmen.
e .html
Imagine a Monopoly in seeds. Gives a whole new meaning to the thoughts of 'Virus'
For more on the Irish Potato Blight, check here
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Famin
I'd say the only difference between the two is the entity claiming ownership. The little people would see little difference.
These farmers should take a lesson from South American coca farmers who have created a large-scale informal distributed selective-breeding program that has, over the last couple of years developed round-up resistant coca without the aid of genetic engineering. There was a wired article a couple of months back that I'm too tired to track.
Mod this sucker up.
I have a small amount of plant breeding knowledge, and I was wondering why the hell it mattered; by buying non-hybridized seeds the farmer would have lost money over the yield of his crosses if the above wasn't true.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
This sounds horrible, until you think about what Monsanto et al. are really trying to control. The US public has made it very clear that many do not want to eat any genetically modified food. If well-meaning farmers can replant the crops whenever and wherever they want, Monsanto et al. cannot guarantee that the public isn't getting genetically modified crops in their food. That could open up a whole new round of liability for the companies.
She's a particular hero of mine, and has been fighting Monsanto for years (as well as a number of other companies with similarly questionable practices). I happened to catch a lecture of hers on local access television, and was fascinated. Of course, I'm a nerdy geek, so strange things fascinate me. Here's some links to some interviews with her over the years.
Eh, just go to Google and look her up. You'll find loads of stuff, as she is a very busy woman.
Well the idea of communism is the opposite concept, but equal in implementation.
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Interesting info, this years corn harvest prices were so low that to buy ONE bag (roughly 20kg) of Monsanto seed corn for next year, you would have to harvest 2 tons of planted corn.
http://www.colombiamobilization.org/article.php?id =89
A month before Wellstone was doused with Roundup, Colombian indigenous leaders visited Congress to personally speak out against the fumigation: "The twelve indigenous peoples have been suffering under this plague as if it were a government decree to exterminate our culture and our very survival," said José Francisco Tenorio, the only leader who was not afraid to use his real name. "Our legal crops -- our only sustenance -- manioc, banana, palms, sugar cane, and corn have been fumigated. Our sources of water, creeks, rivers, lakes, have been poisoned, killing our fish and other living things. Today, hunger is our daily bread. In the name of the Amazonian Indigenous people I ask that the fumigations be immediately suspended."
This is an extremely important issue because it appears that no one has taken into account the viral aspect of the Monsanto seed. The fact that Monsanto created a line of genetically modified seeds that are resistant to Round-Up is immaterial. Any hack of a lab could create some useless genetic trait and then patent it. Then also make sure that the seed easily cross pollinates so that their IP gets distributed to every seed on the face of the planet. Next thing you know every farmer in the world owes them money just because they were big enough asses to infect the world's food source with their modification.
Companies should not be able to patent genetic modifications to seeds unless they can prove 100% that that modification is not transferable through cross pollination.
Likewise, I'm sure you could go to jail for lying to investigators about any other crime, such as producing a bunch of pirate Windows CDs.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
You assert the problem is that the seed replicates itself and that Monsanto makes people sign away the rights to use that feature. You assert that if Monsanto fixed their seed to not replicate, the problem would be gone.
So, let's do a little thought experiment. I wave a wand and the plants no longer produce seed. The problem goes away, the farmers must buy seed each year. Are you happy with Monsanto now?
What do you mean no?
Try to consider what your position is on something and make an argument that aligns with that.
If you are just a plant communist (to use BillG's phraseology), then just say that you are against Monsanto charging for their modified seeds. This seems to be the real thrust of most people on slashdot, I would suspect yourself included.
Insiders within the WH misinformation ministry report that operatives have reached agreement with Monsanto and the FBI, who will be watching all farmers and consumers closely, with highly sensitive bugging devices. It is said that final negotiations will be completed during special behind the scenes negotiating booths being set up at the upcoming presidential inaugural festivities.
It is said that any one who farts as the result of eating Monsanto GM-beans will be arrested and required to do 10,000 hours of community service at corporate headquarters and forced to pay to the full extent of the law.
There is more at issue here than terminator genes or contacts that forbid farmers from saving a portion of their harvest for seed. What most farmers grow are seeds specially created from almost 100 years of trial and error. This process discovered that the cross-pollination between two particular varities of say, corn, produces a seed that will grown into great-tasting, pest resilient corn. HOWEVER, it is not true that seeds produced from this new great corn will be the same. You now are pollinating a hybrid with itself, which causes undesireable genes that were previously surpressed to become dominant. Kinda like siblings getting married and having chrildren. It produces undesireable offspring and is illegal for their own protection. The only way to guarantee more of the same great corn is for the "parent" strains to cross-pollinate again and again.
The contract exists to 1) protect a farmer ignorant of genetics from himself and 2) protect the company if the farmer plants the seeds, gets undesireable results, and sues. Mr. Farmer didn't follow the directions, case dismissed.
I never worried about franken food that much, but this is just plain nuts. This is reason enough to lobby for GM labeling in Canada. This is just so sick.
Monsanto takes the evil corp cake, if you want to see some of their other antics you have to watch a documentary called "the corporation" where monsanto got a story about BGH quashed. The fun part is watching the reporters story about how they kept trying to run the story for about a year until they were finally fired.
After seeing it I am glad they don't use BGH in Canada.
One's plausible, the other is not.
You're missing the bigger issue here. The problem is that Monsanto CAN NOT insure that their genetic modifications will not infect other crops through cross-pollination. That's the problem. That's why the Supreme Court was short-sighted and messed up when they allowed companies to patent genetic modifications to plants.
For example, let's say you are a soybean farmer who decides he's going to hold off from buying the Monsanto seed because you don't like the license terms. But every farm around you does buy the seed. And at the end of the year, you save a little seed for the next year. And the next year you decide that you still don't want to use the Monsanto seed because you already have seed. So you plant and everything seems fine until you get a served papers because Monsanto is suing you for using their seed. And you're confused because you never bought any Monsanto seed. See that's the problem. Through no fault of your own, your natural seed has now been infected with Monsanto's genetic modifications. Is that your fault? Monsanto's the one spreading a virus.
This could very easily lead to the complete elimination of seeds that are unmodified genetically. Monsanto is criminally neglegent for not insuring that their genetically modified seed does not infect ungenetically modified seeds.
So, people do not NOW. However, we require that all farm-grown seed be replantable should some disaster (or plague) distroy the seed production mechanism.
Basically, if a plague is released that attacks the seeds in the factory, maybe the crossbreading will result in a plant with sufficient hybrid vigor to survive the plague. Result: farmer can still produce one third of a crop on average.
Now your catching on. For each bag of seed a small contribution is made to the Republican party. If money is to be made, its ethical.
I buy them, I own them, they're mine. I can do what I like with them.
So, does owning your car give you the right to do anything you like with it, including running over and killing your neighbour if you don't like them ? Surely you don't belive owning something gives you the right to do anything you like with it ?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Genetics isn't an INVENTION of man. Man uses something that already EXIST. And this is SELF-replicating. You can't patent something that will REPRODUCE ITSELF.
Patents are for machines.
These are high yield highly specialized technology; where is the FSF (free seed foundation?)
It's harder to tell who is more stupid; Monsanto for thinking they can get farmers to sign these contracts or the farmers who signed them.
That said, if they are sueing people who didn't sign, and who are victims of cross pollentation that must violate some law about bio tech?
Now if your neighbor buys the seeds and you buy/get the seeds from him and plant them; that is theft and receiving stolen goods.
http://www.hawknest.com/
They're opposites like two rapists fighting over a bound victim are opposites. The rape still occurs no matter who wins.
*shrug*
A lot of agro-business seeds will not produce the same kinds of flowers in a second generation.
Also agro-business seeds often will be infertile in a second generation.
The large Agro companies get huge tax writeoffs. They get large subsidies. Meanwhile they buy up smaller seed producing companies and then stop selling the old line seeds that will polinate and reproduce themselves.
This has been going on for a long long time.
If this were the case, I would countersue them claiming that their GM plants had infested and infected my pure natural plants. If you are a certified organic farmer, perhaps this would be even easier.
They are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Because of the short product cycle they have. Any gene improvement they make will become ubiquitous and nullify the patent in 10 years or so. What to stick it to Monsanto? Buy their seed corn and ship it overseas for charitible use in needy nations. Let them enforce their patent in BF Eygpt instead of tying up the court here.
Monsanto, one of the world's largest producers of GE crops, has been ordered to pay criminal and civil charges totalling US$1.5 million for bribing an Indonesian government official and concealing the payment as consulting fees.
t ails.html?site_id=45&news_id=1581
More at: http://www.greenpeace.org.au/features/features_de
Some farmer gives them the finger and flies a plane over everyone's crops randomly spreading the engineered seed. They may be able to prosecute him but I doubt they'd ever be able to weed out their seed from those crops.
It used to be that companies would engineer rice to grow in more dry conditions for 3rd world countries.. but I guess their greed forced them to stoop to this.
i dont know who told you this, this is completely off base. roundup (glyphosate) degrades over a period of 3 months into ethylamines. many microorganisms will then turn those into CO2, not nitrogen. infact, glyphosate has been found to inhibit anaerobic nitrogen fixation in the soil.
glyphosate is an amino acid analog designed to inhibit enzymes needed for neogenesis (the target supposedly being 5-enolpyruvyl-shikimate-3 phosphate synthase) of the plants amino acids.
while glyphosate has not been found to be harmful to humans, the inactive ingredient surfactant (which makes up 15.0% of roundup), polyoxy-ethyleneamine, IS known to be toxic to humans and is typically contaminated with dioxanes (as a byproduct of the formation of it) which is a known human carcinogen.
I'm pulling this from "The Corporation," but I recall that any form of life except a human being IS patentable.
Sure, of course it's wrong. But it doesn't really matter that it's wrong, it's law. If you want the law struck down, bring the case before a court and argue persuasively, or start worming your way into the hearts and minds of legislators. That's all we can do.
You can't patent a chemical, right?
you can only patent the process for creating/refining that chemical.
DNA is still an acid, is it not?
In a lot of poor countries Monsanto seeds are banned for exactly this reason. It is a threat to the food security of the country. US/Canada where there is easy access to credit the problem might not seem very acute, but in poor countries like Bangladesh or India, one bad crop and the farmer won't have the resources to buy seeds for the next season. It's a manmade famine in the making.
Most intellectual property laws are to the detriment of poor countries. Simply a new form of colonization.
How is it that a "Dr. GeneMachine" can't tell the difference between a "pesticide" and a "herbicide"?
Every time I've used Roundup it killed the plants deader than dead. Didn't seem to bother the bugs much, tho...
It takes an idiot to do cool things - that's why it's cool!
Scott, the big turf company, is working hard to try and get Roundup-ready bent grass seed into the market. They've had the same problems with seed getting out into the wild (i.e., into and past their buffer zone areas around the test plots and production evaluation fields in Central Oregon far more than they anticipated). Naturally, the Willamette Valley, arguably the principal grass seed growing region in the US, if not the world, is not too happy about this.
But at least plans for Roundup-Ready wheat have been shelved indefinitely.
Read up about it more on the Capital Press website: http://capitalpress.com/
The problem I have for it is that Monsanto essentially has pushed ALL liability for the use of its GM seed onto the farmer, as well as leaving the burden of proof of innocence on the farmer. It *should* be that Monsanto has to prove that the farmer intentionally kept the seed after production.
What it really should be is that once the seed leaves the seed warehouse and is stuck into the ground, it's out of Monsanto's control.
Or perhaps they should just then figure out how to get Roundup-ready genes to be passed into hybrids, which inherently on their own typically have less vigor the next generation or two later.
If a smart farmer has essentially developed their own localized, optimized blend of seed over 20 or 40 years, *NEVER* bought RR seed from Monsanto or worked land that had it recently and some of it has been introduced through no action of the farmer (how's he supposed to kill it off, because it's roundup-ready!), and Monsanto can essentially declare the farmer a thief and force him to destroy his life's work?
That is completely fucked up.
Looking through Froogle for RoundUp Ready soybeans I came across this report . How does $4500 for a 218 page report strike you???
You grow GM corn for cattle feed. So does your neighbor.
You buy his "cattle feed" corn and plant it. He buys yours.
OK, that's probably going to get you into hot water, but if you buy "cattle feed" corn on the open market and just happen to "change your mind" and use it for seed, no licensing agreement is going to stop you.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's more like a quart an acre. And that's diluted with a lot of water before spraying. And that is sprayed long enough before a rain for a.) the spray to dry, and b.) the spray to absorb into the foliage.
If you've ever seen how little of the very diluted spray ends up on the ground you'd be amazed. In fact, it usually dries within a minute of hitting the ground, it's such a fine mist. Also, as has been said below, it quickly degrades harmlessly. Also, even if it was consumed in larger doses, it's not very toxic to animals at all.
well said.
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--I have some of those "gene bank" type seeds, in a way anyway. Bought several large sealed cans of various open pollinated seeds. I keep those just packed away, and use other open pollinated for my season to season garden crops. some are many years old, lost track of when I started breeding them now.. It's a "just in case" deal, and eventually I hope to be able to build a pretty large tight greenhouse with decent air filtration and airlock styled entrys for it. Just for that purpose. Cross pollination is an extreme threat though,generally speaking, as is cross species contamination (it's happened already) and just wait until they get "terminator" gene modified seeds out on the market. They were going to do it, public outcry got them to back off just a little bit and "just do research" but it's only a matter of time now before they bribe off enough legislators to get it legal to distribute.
I think it's one of the larger threats facing the planet. People think about nukes or terror attacks or whatnot, but I think mucking around with the planets food supply with GM products will eventually result in some rather nasty disasters. I simply *don't* trust those industries spokesmodel scientists to be anywhere nears truthful on the subject. IMO, they are simply too blinded by economic greed to seriously acknowledge the inherent dangers in what they are doing. We've seen the same arrogance and public assurances of "safe" with any number of past "new shiny and improved" products that turned out to be not so swift. Just generally speaking now, could be anything, thinking that just relocating species to brand new areas was a good idea (carp, english sparrows, kudzu, etc). Releasing chemcicals for various purposes, medications that turned out to be more harmful than good or had unintended side effects, etc that were missed in the "scientific testing".
I am sure they are intellectually aware of it,back to these various GM modded plants, but that itch for buckets of scratch is just too strong for them to ignore. I know they are capable of creating most anything now, and I have read some amazing claims on what they can do with them, make new medicines, etc, but still...I just don't know if *they* know way down the road how things will turn out. Here's a good analogy, well, good enough for slashdot purposes. Look at software code, people can look at it and use it for awhile and it seems fine, perfectly ok, then one day someone does something just a tad different and POOF a large vulnerability is exposed. With code (in most cases), it's not that big of a deal, it just gets fixed, but with live growing things? Wind blowing pollen around, trucks hauling stuff hither and yon...it could get messy. Look at down in Louisiana now, the last batch of hurricanes brought up a nasty disease that's spreading all through the soybeans now. Stuff happens, planetary wildcards happen. I think with "food" they should go real s-l-o-w and careful. Wouldn't bother me a bit if they studied their products for decades before even teeny tiny uber controlled trials out in the open.
As to "always be able to purchase non GM.." you should investigate what's going down in a lot of african countries and in india lately on this front. Even in Iraq, we had as thread on Iraq and farmers just a little while ago, like last month. They -monsanto they and others- are actively trying to corner "the market" there with their brands of seeds through the legislative (read:bribes) process. They are as far from playing fair as you can get. They tried to even patent a widely used Indian wheat that's been openly grown and shared around India for thousands of years, and they didn't even invent it! It's a form of wheat that lacks some markers that causes it to be not as "sticky" in baking as regular wheat, it has lower gluten content, that's where Indians get their "flat bread". Monsanto ups and patents it! Just said "ya,we own it, give us a patent" and the freekin patent office rubber stamps it! In india they are fighting it, they had to fight in in england
I grew up on a farm and understand the why this is a problem very well.
Farmers buy seed that is basically very expensive crops harvested and cleaned and separated and tested and treated, that helps it's performance. I.e smashed seends don't grow well, seeds with mold on them don't grow well, seeds that insects eat don't grow well. This is why proportionately seed is much more expensive than feed, which is what most of the crops grown in this country are used for.
Feed usually does contain seeds, just not well protected or near the quality of commercial seed. Growing up, every year my father would always set aside a portion of the harvest to be cleaned and used as seed the next year, if for some reason commercial seed were not available. This is done mainly with wheat and soybeans, due to the population planting issues, and germ rates (wheat and soybeans are planted with a expoentially greater seed/acre density than corn is for example).
Every year, my father would send samples of each vareity from the crop that he saved off to a lab for testing. Information returned would include percent foreign matter (such as weed seeds and hulls) and the most important was the germ rate, which is basically a percentage of how many of the seeds from the sample sprouted when provided warmth, water and nutrients. In other words how many of the seeds are duds.
We could never harvest a crop or clean our saved seed enough to get germ rates within 10% of commercial seed. The equipment we used to harvest it, and our storage methods just weren't as good. Every year that I can remember, after we bought commercial seed, and had planted it, and had a crop come up, we sold the grain we had saved for seed from the previous crop.
That's basically the how and why of why saving seed vs. buying commercial seed. We never were able to determine that we would save enough money by using our own, to make it worth while. Now, for some additional issues related to GMOs (Genetically modified organisms).
These commercial seeds that are GMOs obviously bear a price premium, and what company would want to give that up? I see this as the biggest driving force behind the contracts, licensing and lawsuits. Secondly, Monsanto obviously can't put any kind of guarantee of performance on recycled seed, and most likely wishes to avoid tarnishing their product's reputation. Thirdly, and this I don't really know enough about, but is one reason that they give, is that the original seed is bred in such a way that it's crop produces optimal seed to be resistant to the proper compounds and the possibility that subsequent generations could stray from that original organisms exist. (I just don't know about this, but it sounds plausible enough)
Ironically back on our family farm, we have had mixed success with GMOs. We continue to use traditional methods on about half our crops every year. What happens when everything becomes RoundUp Ready? When volunteer corn starts growing in a bean field, but spraying the beans with roundup doesn't kill it, because last years corn crop was round-up ready? This is why we continue to choose the seed with the location it will be planted in mind, so that we can use our chemicals of choice on it, to control the problems that we know are there. We also use wide varieties of seed from a wide variety of seed suppliers to increase resistance to single variety problems. Sometimes I really don't know how my father keeps this all straight on our mid size farm.
Do we ever plant RoundUp ready crop again as seed the next year? NO. Do we save some each year, as a precaution for things we can't even imagine (shortages, catastrophes, WWIII, etc.)? YES. Hopefully we never ever have to use it. Afterall it really doesn't make that great of seed compared to what is commercially available.
Comments? Questions? please!
-Mikey P
Poverty and Globalization by Vandana Shiva.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
1) When the patent expires (which has got to be less than 20 years from now), the whole world will be able to benefit from the invention at no charge.
2) There's an objective test as to whether a seed infringes. (Presumably Monsanto will do it for you, or show you how to do it, or it says in the patent how to do it). Also presumably there's no prior art; no seeds before Monsanto's invention had the feature of resisting Roundup by the patented mechanism.
3) There's an alternative. If you don't want Monsanto's seeds, you can get others. It will cost you more to weed your crop, but that's what you did before the invention anyway. I expect Monsanto will help you find other seeds if it becomes hard.
4) If you (or your cooperative) wants to negotiate license fees for Monsanto seeds for the life of the patent, you can do so; then you'll be protected against being gouged.
5) If you feel like finding another herbicide, figuring out how it works, figuring how to code some DNA which will cause resistance, and figuring out how to insert that DNA into seeds, that's fine. You can read Monsanto's patent for inspiration. You might be able to patent it yourself, or you might want to throw it open for all to use. Depends how you are funded. Your choice; it might can the sales of Roundup and Monsanto's seeds if you come up with a good one. Monsanto's risk.
I wonder if there would be any grounds to sue Monsanto for modifying the genetics of your fields... "trespassing" if you will... from the cross-pollination of neighboring farms.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
look whos on the receiving end ....
US agribusiness giant Monsanto has agreed to pay a one million US dollar penalty to settle charges of bribing the Indonesian government, the US Justice Department said last week. Criminal charges filed in the District of Columbia charged Monsanto with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in connection with an "illegal payment" of 50,000 dollars to a senior Indonesian Ministry of Environment official. Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray said that a bribe by a Monsanto employee was aimed at facilitating the cultivation of genetically modified crops and was falsely certified as "consultant fees" in the company's books and records. The Justice Department said in a statement that the St. Louis, Missouri-based company "agreed to accept responsibility for the conduct of its employees in paying the bribe and making the false books and records entries."
Monsanto said in a statement it regretted the actions of those involved in bribery and that it accepted responsibility. "Monsanto accepts full responsibility for these improper activities and we sincerely regret that people working on behalf of Monsanto engaged in such behaviour," Monsanto's general counsel Charles Burson said as quoted by Reuters. Mr. Burson said the company had taken actions to address the activities in Indonesia.
Monsanto has also agreed to adopt internal compliance measures and cooperate with ongoing criminal and civil investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission. An independent compliance expert is to be chosen to audit the company's program and oversee implementation of the new policies.
Monsanto also settled related civil enforcement proceedings by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which issued an administrative order finding that the company violated Foreign Corrupt Practices Act provisions. "Monsanto consented to the entry of a final judgement in the federal lawsuit requiring it to pay a 500,000 civil penalty, and consented to the Commission's issuance of its administrative order." Mr. Wray warned that: "companies cannot bribe their way into favourable treatment by foreign officials."
"Providing a self replicating product and then suing people for it could be perceived as a form of corporate entrapment."
*sigh* The ignorance abounds. Simply do what nature does. Create a subspecies that can only breed with itself. Or a species that needs roundup to survive (spray or else). You all sit on this board playing "what if", and don't even bother to ask yourself "Has others already forseen my complaints and implimented measures?" Are you the ONLY smart people on this planet?
I don't own my neighbour, so I can't do anything I like with my neighbour. So fuck you.
Well, I could always, say, try and get others involved too. In fact...oh wait.
You are, however, absolutely correct. Really, this law's not going to change until people make widespread demand for it to happen. If everyone who wished that IP would be loosened/abolished spoke up and demanded it, that's, I dunno, somewhere to the tune of 55 million voices? I certainly think we might see the "Sonny Bono Copyright Perpetuation Act" gone, copyrights/patents reduced to reasonable periods of time and imposing only reasonable restriction, and fair use coming back strong.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
"This is absolutely sick! Seeds float through the air, and when they land, they grow into plants, by their very nature!
"
OH NO! Those super uber brained slashdotters thought of something those dumber than a box of rock plant scientists never thought of. What if plant pollen got blown around by the wind? Who knew such a thing could happen? Man! Smart enough to play with a plant's genetics to give it properties that don't occur naturally, and yet we at Monsanto were too stupid to see this happening. Thank God for Slashdotters to catch these slipups in our knowledge. What would we do without you guys?
... people did you kill with your patent.
In a world where people are starving, hoarding a food producing advance is murder. This is a much less obtuse jump than holding someone who's field was cross polinated liable for "stealing". (And stop calling it stealing dammit, we're tired of that already!)
We'll know that the legal system has finally matured when at long last, it prosocutes those who are wrong, not those who are "illeagal".
"Women sense my power. They seek my seed. I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my seed."
The important bit here is the "as far I'm concerned." We don't need more people trying to legislate morality. One can argue the benefits of this particular issue, but I bristle when someone refers to issues like this as "right/wrong." Kind of implies that your value structure is the right one, when you take to asserting this belief as truth.
People, particularly americans, often confuse what is legal/illegal and what is right/wrong. Please don't.
I don't know what this "American" bit is about. Who died and left you to decide for the world what's right and wrong? Legal/Illegal is the only thing that actually CAN be determined. Right/wrong is an *opinion.* You're entitled to yours, but that doesn't make it universal.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
For a while, one of Monsanto's locations was really close to where I live. ... I'd hate to see what happens if one of their "special" seeds were to have wafted down the road...
And not even in the legal sense, either!
For the record, that is only an entry point, most of the exchange of genetic material happens much more informally.
Call them tree huggers or whatever, but these are the people that are keeping the world's genetic line available to all, and this started about the same time that the patent madness did. For obvious reasons. Think of this as the ham radio response to the internet.
For the record, I'm not even a botanist, or whatever, but I'm a member. I get requests maybe twice a month for things I'm growing, and I send them off. Kinda cool, right? At least, I think it is.
I don't need Monsanto's crap, and if they infect me, I will be pissed off, and they can count on me making that apparent.
I forget what 8 was for.
DDT was once safe too. You could get DDT-laced drinks. Children were sprayed with DDT. DDT loved you, and boy, did people love DDT.
And no, Roundup does not "completely break down into Nitrogen". It breaks down into many compounds, some of which are harmful to humans.
Farmers, don't be idiots: when Monsanto presents you with a lawsuit, YOU present them with a BILL. A bill for $10,000 a day, per sprout, itemized as "Storage and care of pateneted genetic material".
Be sure to first post a sign out front of your farm stating, "Will host patented genetic material, $10,000 a day, per growing life form. Agreement to these terms will be indicated by allowing your patented genetic material to be blown onto this land. If you do not agree, then any growing material here is tresspass."
This all sounds a lot like a legalistic method of making revenue stream out of what has resulted in mankind being capable of doing bookkeeping.
Bite me, I can grow seeds, and if I want, procreate. It is that simple.
I forget what 8 was for.
I think Monsanto were at one point going to make most of their output into 'suicide seeds' - these are plants that produce non-fertile seeds, so farmers wouldnt be able to plant them.
google for 'suicide seeds' for more info, also called 'Terminator' patents.
my band has a song about GM food:
Well you reap what you sow and you sow what you reap
from the share of the grain you have stored
but when some sod breeds suicide seed that wont grow
you sow only what you can afford
but with all this biotechnology now
maybe one day soon they'll design
a multinational with a heart
and a government with a spine
they say that we've been cross-breeding for centuries
this isnt anything new
when i see a pig shag a tomato successfully
i might concede that its true
DDT is human safe. DDT is in fact environmentally safe, the scares were pure hype. Look it up! DDT would have saved 60 million third-worlders from malaria and death. For scale, that's approximately 200 tsunamis, one after the other. The worldwide DDT ban is the greens' holocaust.
> applied discrete mathematics == software is just wrong.
I'm currently against patents in general because standards used for issuing patents should be much higher. BUT if the standards can be rised (+ changes to couple of other things) then I think software patents are ok.
Non-patentability of software (europe) and mathematics is really slowing progress because the resulting IP (from costly R&D) cannot be protected.
--
The quick red fox jumps over the blue e.
By far the funniest and best sig ever!
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
Monsanto is selling what they call "Terminator technology" (first reference I found: http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/sterileSeed.htm ) to countries where getting enough food to survive for the day could be a problem.
The "technology" is a fancy word for genetically designing the next-generation seeds sterile, so that the farmers can't grow any new plants from the seeds produced from plants grown by Monsanto seeds.
Now, very few things pisses me off to the extent that this kind of behaviour does. (I can actually start sweating, merely thinking about this)
The idea of exploiting the starving seems to be good business for the Monsanto people.
This kind of behaviour - maximizing profits, disregard for human life, and the complete lack of any moral consideration, is, I believe, one of few that is taking us in a direction which ultimately will bring down the sad downfall (sudden, fiery death for the masses is still a threat) of humanity.
To me, the people who profit from selling these "Terminated seeds" (I here refrain from spilling my thoughts too bluntly, especially avoiding a sentence containing a suggested use of the words "Monsanto executives" and "terminate") to starving people, occupy a niche lower in the food chain than people who murder the elderly for money, and those who sell women and children for sexual exploitation and their personal profit.
Please, even if you disagree with my views, let at least the facts about this be known.
I recall my dad watching The National a canadian news program one night when that Monsanto story was on. I believe the The National is on the CBC channel so if anyone is looking for more information they could perhaps obtain a transcript.
burn monsanto down and plant whatever you want, end of problem
Rights bring responsibilities.
If Monsanto wants to enjoy the economic rents , they must also take the heat for cross pollination.
The courts must also be generous in compensating those who suffer wind-drift problems. Who pays for the buffer zones that must be left idle? Farmers will stop buying when their neighbour sues them for permanent and perpetual trespass, and the damages will be huge. A GM free cropper downwind, could get very rich, if the cards come down the right way.
In the EU/UK the dirty secret is out - wind drift goes miles, and weeds also grow resistant between 10 mile buffer zones. As for yields, no miracle here - the soil becomes barron, when you only have 1/2 inch of viable topsoil or less. GM seeds DO have a place, for those who live on an island.
A couple of years ago I went to a public meeting about GM in the UK. There was a guy with an American accent who kept putting forward pro-GM arguments. Eventually the chairperson asked him what he did for a living. He tried to dodge the question but eventually the chair got him to admit he worked for Monsanto's PR department.
Later on Percy Schmeiser showed up at the meeting and completely demolished him. It was a joy to watch.
http://savingiceland.org
Monsanto isn't the first or only company to protect their genetics. The seed industry is very competitive. New Hi-Bred genetics are released every year with hopes of bringing higher yields. Rival companies, in the past, have stolen each others' genetics and past them off as their own. These contracts exist to protect years and years of research.
This is what Vandana Shiva has been trying to get people to pay attention to for years now. It started with a company patenting varieties of Basmati rice, killing any potential for fast growing species to be used to alleviate hunger...
http://www.vshiva.net/
Let's not miscast this. People who use the Monsanto crops sign an agreement to to replant. these arent the cases of cross pollination these are cases where people replanted on purpose. If the defendant farmers could show that there were only a few places where the seeds fell it wouldn't be an issue. This is about something called "Roundup ready" crops that are specifically engineered not to be killed by Monsanto's weed killer called Roundup. The only reason someone replants these seeds is because they intend to use Roundup on the crops. It kills the weeds and these seeds create crops that survive the herbicide. You wouldn't use Roundup on crops that weren't "Roundup Ready" because there is nearly zero chance that they would survice. Using Roundup shows that the farmers knew they had stolen the engineered seeds.
Nobody try to compare this with the usual p2p IP arguments, this is very different.
Firstly nobody NEEDs the new madonna album, Half Life 2 or a copy of photoshop, we can all lvie without it. You NEED food, or we all die within days, its a different kettle of fish tor estrict the ownership of food.
Secondly, you ahve to DO something knowingly to get copyrighted material, with seeds, they just blow over your fence.
Monsanto are behaving outrageiously, and given the climate of pro-business, sod the consumer in the US, they will probably get away with it.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
This does not surprise me. Moansanto is doing not much more than protecting it's interest and found a legal way to build a cash cow.
An folks wonder why the american farmer is in so much trouble!!
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That you are effectively locked-in to buying Monsanto seed for the rest of your life.
If you stop buying monsanto seed, and begin growing non-monsanto plants, monsanto can still sue you, because the soil is effectively monsanto property. Their claim, basically being "genetic modification of the soil". There have been a very few cases where Monsanto has been ordered by courts to remove the topsoil they "own".
Thus, year after year, you must pay out the A$$ to a greedy company hooked on profit.
Any one who thinks of farmers as "traditionally non-tech-savvy" hasn't talk to to many farmers in the last decade or two. As some one who has had a fair amount of contact with farmers in a number of a crops over the years, I can say with confidence that the average American farmer is easily more tech savvy than the average American in general. They have to be. Two reasons:
1) Margins are slim, and farmers need any advantage they can get. Most farmers today stay highly informed about advances in agriculture (the average farmer is much better informed and rational about transgenic crops than his non-farmer counterpart), and more and more are moving to a precision agriculture model, depending on GPS, lasers, in-field temperature and humidity monitors, and modern planting and harvest equipment.
2) Farmers are running a business. Generally by themselves, or with help only from family members. In this day and age, running a business involves running a computer, and if you're doing that yourself, you're going to be your own IT department, too.
I really resent the fact that people persist in this idea that farmers are ignorant bumpkins...
Even though people do routinely use Roundup anyway, people aren't spraying Roundup on non-Roundup Ready plants at times when it will make a difference whether the plants are transgenic...you don't spray something on your plants that could kill them unless you have good reason to expect that it won't kill them. The advantage of Roundup Ready is that you can go ahead and blast away at the weeds with it long after your crop plants have come up.
And since Monsanto owns Roundup, if you're not patronizing Monsanto, then you have no use for the transgenic anyhow.
There was a big uproar about terminating seeds and how they will be the doom of society as a whole as we mess with nature. It was my understanding that they were still doing that, but I guess not.
It's a monopoly- does anyone else see that? Why aren't they getting the same rapp Microsoft is? One company who is requiring all future purchases come from them, and only really one provider of these seeds.
Then again, what ever happened to real food- with moderate but reasonable yeilds?
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
dupont for example has patent EP 744 888 which describes corn(maize) with oleic acid > 55%.
: www.ukabc.org/FAOengl-sv-j.doc+Patent+EP+744+888&h l=en/
l
in mexico you find such plants in the wild for ages...
guess what - it doesnt stop duPont for suing you if such a plants happens to be on your ground
more info here: http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:Ts0FIArHTZ8J
and here: http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/2040.htm
I'm all for bioengineered food, but not when stuff like this happens.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
More like corporate communism. Look at airlines that demand money from congress when they are in debt. Corporations really want to own communism and own the government. Oh, wait....
You know; the techniques for developing herbecide resistant crops like this are probably pretty well known in the biology field. There must be some gene-hackers out there with the ability to work on this in their own basement.
After you've got a good candidate found and bred, then it should really only be a matter of getting it approved by the gov't. Perhaps this could be part of someone's thesis.
One: There is no evidence progress is being slowed by the absence of software patents. Quite the contrary actually - before the US introduced software patents, they innovated most in computing (Internet etc.). But US-based software has been largely stagnant for over a decade in terms of actual fundamental progress- in that time while Europe had no software patents but the US did, Europe innovated most (The Web, produced in CERN in europe...).
Two: Costly R&D? Don't make me laugh. You need a PC to do most software research and development. That's about it. Also, the cost of something is not an argument for its worth anyway - if it were, it would be most economical to produce something as inefficiently as possible. It would cost far more to build a car out of toothpicks (if its even possible) - does that mean a toothpick car deserves greater "protection"? No. It means the producer was a jackass. Similarly, if giant inefficient bureaucratic corporations need patent laws to compete with loosely connected small businesses and individuals with PCs, that's NO GOOD REASON to give them patents!
I actually disagree with all patents, not just software ones. If you want to reward invention, give Inventors Grants, not monopoly rights. Patents are not about speeding up progress, they're about who gets to control progress.
Agent Orange is the code name for a powerful herbicide and defoliant used widely by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Agent Orange was used from 1961 to 1970 and has caused serious harm to the health of both Vietnamese and Americans, their children and grandchildren.
During the Vietnam War, Agent Orange's official military purpose was to remove the leaves of trees to prevent guerrilla fighters of the National Liberation Front from hiding.
Agent Orange was found to have toxic dioxin contaminants which have been blamed for causing health disorders and birth defects in both the Vietnamese population and U.S. war veterans. It has also been found to have carcinogenic properties affecting females primarily.
An April 2003 report paid for by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that during the Vietnam War, 3,181 villages were sprayed directly with herbicides. Between 2.1 and 4.8 million people "would have been present during the spraying." Furthermore, many U.S. military personnel were also sprayed or came in contact with herbicides in recently sprayed areas. The study was originally undertaken for the U.S. military to get a better count of how many veterans served in sprayed areas. Researchers were given access to military records and Air Force operational folders previously not studied. The re-estimate made by the report places the volume of herbicides sprayed between 1961 and 1971 to a level 7,131,907 liters more than an uncorrected estimate published in 1974 and 9.4 million more liters than a 1974 corrected inventory. It was produced under contract for the Army by MONSANTO, et al.
Facts from http://wikipedia.org/Agent_Orange
Do you find it surprising that when you buy your seeds from someone who used to make chemical weapons for the Vietnam War, you are screwed? I don't.
Monsanto is just wrong.
Indeed. See this post.
Do it the European way: Don't buy products that contain genetically modified food.
In Europe, most consumers think that way, and therefore no supermarket gets GM food, since it does not sell.
Now, if you are living in a country, in which every single product abuse must be clearly labeled ("Don't use the microwave to dry your cat!"), but which does not require to label GM food, someting is clearly wrong. But you can still do something: Ask for GM free products, do a test -- if they contain GM food, sue the supermarket where you bought it (some millions $ would be fine). I assure you: Everybody will afterwards label the products correctly.
I have no idea about it... Very good post. Thanks!
well this is what Im talking about... corporate facism is the marriage between state and corporations. Now to the point where corporations retain control over the population than the goverment (ie people's union). This is done in the form of handouts (you call this communism, I call this ransom), and buying legislation.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Could someone create something like GPL'd versions of crops (meaning GPL that includes patents), spread them everywhere and then sue the multinationals for violating the GPL when their crops inevitably got contaminated and they tried to charge license fees on seed with GPL seed content?
monsantao controls what you do with the seeds including any second generation seeds you produce.
That's is just like the GPL and other open source licenses.
The person who sold you the car doesn't have any rights to stop you doing these things.
Oops, I glitched the link:
to sue those evil nasty pirates (and dolfins).
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
*finally*, after several "you're wrong!" "no you're wrong!" posts, someone actually comes along with a source. Thank you, ac!
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Monsanto's very own website has a press release detailing a settlement with the SEC and DOJ for bribing officials in Indonesia and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Indymedia has further links.
the world is truly going crazy
$7.95/mo hosting, 2.4GB disk, 120GB
Cripes, if they can get away with it, they'll charge us for the air we breath, claiming that the oxygen their crops exhale is actually the property of Monsanto.
In Iraq, they've gone one better: the US puppet government has outlawed crop planting from seeds the farmers' natural crops produce. This is not from Monsanto (or any other US Agra-business) seed stock, but from Mother Nature's own. The farmers are required to buy seed stock from U.S. Firms.
Next, one of these company's will manage to sneak a sequence from the human genome past the patent clerks, and start levying fees against everyone who has a living body.
Why did this get taken off the front page?
This is the same mentality brought up by riaa and the mpaa, same logic applies, monsanto sells the seed, seed thats suppossed to be genetically engineered to not grow after the first growing generation (hence the term terminator seed) as it is not suppossed germinate after the first generation, this is how monsanto has a death grip on the seed for the plant inquestion, if you want to plant it , you have to buy new seeds from monsantos present years seed crop. That's why monsanto is suing this guy, if word gets out that they are selling poorly engineered seed that can turn out a crop in the next season (at a narrowed expense margin for the farmer by the way) then monsanto looses millions to farmers who can now cull a seed stock back from the previous years seed they harvested and from land they already grow from, oh yea and make a wider margin of profit . I hope the guy wins!
How can it have escaped the notice of people here that /. had a story on just this sort of law being forced on the farmers of Iraq by the U.S. It was on November 13 last year:
2 02 3220.shtml?tid=191&tid=155&tid=219
http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/04/11/13/
The effect is to make Iraqi farmers slaves of transnationals and the country's agriculture a _revenue-generating_ experimental farm. It seems as though no one's stopped to consider how the radioactivity will skew the results. As one of the links in the previous story has it:
"In a short time, Iraq will be living under the new American credo: Pay Monsanto, or starve."
These are the _real_ terrorists. It's not enough that we've made a mess of things by polluting the things that the stream of life depends on; now the stream of life _itself_ is being polluted.
This is _beyond_ pure evil, beyond even the wickedness of the current administration. It's a declaration of perpetual war against, well, humanity. Don't expect the resistance to it to ever stop.
Don't be fooled! From:
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=6
"Once introduced into the agro-ecological cycle there is no possible recall or cleanup from genetic pollution"
It DOES rival with "If you haven't signed a license, and seeds blow across the road, Monsanto can't sue you because you never signed a license." when Monsanto has done *exactly* that.
If, by some miraculous chance, you didn't notice it; numerous posts have already linked to the story in question. It still amazes me that people don't know the difference between patent-infringement and breach of contract. Especially slashdot readers should be aware of the differences, with SCO and all that. You don't need to have signed any contract or licence to get sued for patent-infringement, let this be clear.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"Right or wrong, the famers entered into the contract knowingly. The company bypassed thousands, or tens of thousands of years of evolution by producing a genetically advanced form of crop. The farmer signed a contract. Farmer violated contract. Seems open and shut to me, Monsanto doesn't have a monopoly on the corn market."
I think what the parent poster wanted to say is, that signing a contract is not all-encompassing. A simple example to demonstrate this so you might understand: in my country, some shops claim you can not return your goods, once bought. It says so in the conditions when you buy it. According to your reasoning, since I bought a product of such a shop, I am bound by the rules of their contract. I should have gone to 'another' shop if I didn't like it, right?
Wrong. This is the american view on things, which the parent poster hinted at. Alas, it is not my viewpoint; I'm of the opinion I have rights too. And indeed, the clause that prohibits bringing your goods back (even without a reason) *IS* null and void (though not many people know this). So clearly, the fact they made the contract with that prohibition, and I 'agreed' to it by buying their product, does still not give them the right to do so. In your worldview, this must seem incomprehensible, in mine it's called basic consumer protection.
If the law didn't protect (even though it's often a weak protection) individual rights, including those of a consumer or user, we would soon all be dancing to the tunes of mega-corps. In europe we seem to realise that danger more then in the USA.
"Not really, the enhancements are what is being licensed by the contract."
That's nothing more then semantics. If Monsanto ever owned the patent of an 'enhanced' human, would you consider it fully in their right to consider their creations as property, and make restrictions on the propagation of said humans, even when parents that opted for these kids agreed to the contract?
Once again, as the parent poster said, you seem to ignore the question whether it is right, with the question of being technically lawfull. You seem to be a dude who accepts a law, because it is the law. I (and many other europeans) would rather accept a law because it is right (which is the main meaning of 'justice' after all).
Not that europeans are intrinsically all that noble or better, mind you. After all, during WW2 in nazi-germany, it was lawful to report and turn in (and discriminate) Jews too. Strictly spoken, one should follow the law, as you said. In any normal sense, however, one should spit on the Nazi's, as I spit on Monsanto.
And no, I'm not comparing Monsanto to the SS, but I am making the case that because something is technically spoken 'law', it isn't always right and it shouldn't always be followed. I do not subscribe to your premise that, because there is a contract, all the provisions in that contract outweigs all other considerations, even when a law says so.
"What the fuck does this have to do with being American? Troll."
Well, the parent poster might have been guilty of overgeneralisation, because I know you have some thoughtful and critical americans too, but he does have a point to some degree. Americans typically have the strange notion that everything, and I mean everything, should be regarded in the light of money and profit, and that the pursuit of personal enrichment outweighs every other consideration.
That this leads to a concentration of a few wealthy rich and a mass of extremely poor, that corporations have such strong lobbies they virtually make out the politics and that rights are being trampled on in the name of economy, seems not only to escape most americans, but even when noticed, it hardly leads to any protest. The majority of you lot seem to accept this as 'the way it is supposed to be'.
Europeans, however, have quite another picture of how the world should be. Not to say we don't have the same weaknesses of all humans, ofcourse. But still, their IS a difference
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
It doesn't matter. God will save us. Just ask any right wing republican red state uneducated hick. God will save us; and if he doesn't, and this kind of thing happens, it's because of the homosexuals, pagans and heathens.
I'm sorry, but here in Kentucky that is truly, truly how they believe. Church literature is infused with politics, all for the corporate good. For example, war is ok, well, because it always happens (that's what I was told when I asked why we didn't push for peace).
Don't send your child to college, because they will get educated and come back liberal (it doesn't take much to be labled liberal here. Everyone concerned about things like this discussion is a liberal).
The ignorance spreads from generation to generation here. Nothing is taken seriously, because it's all just God's will. Mind you, I am a Christian, but I am not some blind fundamentalist fox news watcher.
Something's got to be done about the ignorance.
It's bound to happen in grain crops as well. Farmers could speed it along by spraying a very dilute solution in the center of the field each year and keeping that seed for next year's planting. Not a good idea to spray the edges and cultivate resitant weeds.
Folks that dislike GM crops could do this on purpose and then distribute the seeds. That's not copying the gene or reverse engineering it, but developing a competing product.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Oh ... wait a minute ... I thought the title was "Plant a seed, get suede". Nevermind.