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Supreme Court To Decide If Monsanto GMO Patents Are Valid
tomhath writes with this exerpt from a Reuters story: "The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear an Indiana farmer's appeal that challenges the scope of Monsanto Co.'s patent rights on its Roundup Ready seeds. Mr. Bowman bought and planted 'commodity seeds' from a grain elevator. Those soybean seeds were a mix and included some that contained Monsanto's technology. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case over the objections of the Obama administration, which had urged the justices to leave the lower court rulings in place."
Wait for the food monopolies... oh wait, they're already here.
After all, the manufacture, distribution and use of Monsanto's GM product is presumably regulated by some governmental agency? I tend to think that FDA is involved, at least? Monsanto's seed got onto that farmer's land without his knowledge or consent, and the potential damages he could suffer as a result of Monsanto's technology being inadvertently deployed on his land are demonstrably quite large. The ultimate fault is Monsanto's, for failing to adequately control their genetically modified produce's growth and proliferation.
They contaminated his crops with their seed. They owe him compensation.
When GM labelling comes in in California, he will have to label his crop as GM contaminated, and that will reduce his profits. He did not seek that contamination, Monsanto were lax about cross contamination.
It may be true that he grew more as a result, but that does not mitigate the damage they did. How is he supposed to know that the seeds he buys and plants are contaminated with GM seeds? In effect they're burdening ever farmer with a requirement to detect their GM crop contamination, as necessary for the GM labeling requirements.
Monsanto polluted the seed pool, and others should not pay for their pollution.
IANAL, but in this case that doesn't matter.
Lots of people here will argue the merits one way or another, adding ever more subtle points to a cauldron of legal opinion that attempts to guess the outcome... ...and it doesn't matter one whit.
Regardless of the law, the lower court decision cannot be allowed to stand simply as a matter of practicality. If it does, Monsanto stands to control virtually all farmland in America and put all farmers out of business. Monsanto would find itself in the position of controlling all food prices and dictating whatever terms it likes in the manner of process and production.
The simplest solution is to rule that, absent any contractual obligations, the patent holder's rights are exhausted after first sale of self-reproducing physical objects. For anything beyond this, the rules of contract law would apply. Farmers would be bound by whatever contracts they enter into with Monsanto.
Monsanto's mistake was in freely allowing the sale of the harvested seed. A second-generation-seed purchaser is under no contractual obligation to Monsanto because they didn't enter into a contract. If Monsanto wants this to happen differently, then they need to word the original contract in such a way that this can't happen - so that the original purchaser can't sell seed for replanting, for instance.
Monsanto winning this would be really, *really* bad.
Clarence Thomas used to work for Monsanto as an attorney in the 70s. I'm going to guess that a hypocrite won't really care about a little thing like conflict of interest.
It didn't stop him from ruling on the Affordable Care Act.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The research methods used in that article have been criticised by a lot of people. Not all published scientific articles are correct.
And in light of this, we should ask again why anybody would be expected to vote for him... Oh yeah... something about lizards..
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there are at least two other people on the ballot... Maybe we ought to give one of them a shot and see what happens. I doubt they could do much worse, but we'll never know if we don't try. Like the lottery, you can't win if you don't play.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Because it isn't about sexualising Santa Clause (who isn't part of a religion either, so double fail there).
But since you SAW it as such, this must mean you see EVERYTHING as religious.
Ergo proving you are the religious nutjob.
Obama does suck, but Mitt Romney is a far more dangerous choice - not so much because of his policies, but because the far-right Republican party would have control of at least one, and possibly both houses of Congress. They are a party of war-mongers, elitists who favor the rich, and have a downright hatred of government. Their extremist social policies seek to enforce a "Christian nation" "as the founders intended".
Mitt Romney is willing to say and do ~anything~ to get elected. He has no principles. And based on the positions that he -has- taken, he wants a regressive tax system where the "job creators" (aka rich people) are taxed very little, and us non-rich (aka moochers) have to "pay our fair share". He has pandered to Israel and repeatedly shown during his trips overseas, that he has no understanding of foreign policy or affairs, and makes brash, off-the-cuff remarks that can be seen as aggressive and undisciplined.
This man is extremely dangerous not only for America, but for the entire world. Obama might not be any good, but Romney will destroy the American dream, and several other countries along with it.
Look, Monsanto is a horrible horrible company - but the cancer study stuff was flawed.
They should be brought down for patent shakedowns, but the cancer thing wasn't really proven conclusively in any fashion from that study.
both the GMO strain and roundup itself cause cancer
Glyphosate (sold under several brand names, including "Roundup") has been used worldwide for quite some time. If it was a problem you'd have thought it would have been caught earlier.
> 1) The fact that the control group contained 10 mice. That's right. 10 mice.
Thanks for listing some of the problems. In addition to all of your other points, there is the distinct possibility that the results were "cherry-picked" (having a small control group would make this easier). Since the researchers aren't releasing all of the data (including how many times they may have run this experiment before obtaining this particular result), there is no way we can evaluate whether this is at all interesting.
A lot of people don't understand that because science is, for the large part, a self-correcting system on large time scales, the peer review process is not actually designed to totally eliminate wrong research results from being published. In fact, one can make the analogy to the optimization algorithm of simulated annealing, where, while trying to optimize a function with many local minima, it is beneficial to sometimes progress in directions which make the result less optimal, so that overall the minimum attained is more likely to be the global one.
I don't trust studies if someone other than the person conducting them has the right to deny permission to report them.
Someone having the ability to selectively censor your experiments from being published has the power to bias the experiment by putting otherwise objective data through a subjective filter.
I fail to understand how I am a kool-aid drinker, when I point out that a) they both suck, and b) cite facts to back those arguments up. Mitt Romney was "for it before he was against it", and we see that especially with the health care plan that he passed in Massachusetts. Mitt Romney is an outright liar (worse than most politicians), and Obama didn't call him out on any of it during the first debate. http://factcheck.org/2012/10/dubious-denver-debate-declarations/ Nowhere in my post did I say or even imply that Obama isn't also an ideologue. He takes liberties with the facts and with his record as well, but has not changed his platform 180 degrees in the course of a day. It has been the stated goal of the Republican party to make him a one-term president, and they have obstructed nearly every piece of controversial legislation that Democrats have introduced. The Senate filibustered more bills than in all the years this country has existed. With the "Tea Party" at the helm, they have shifted to the far right with their social, economic, and foreign policies. Obama doesn't know how to play the game. His inexperience at politics means that he doesn't know the key players on a personal basis and never had to work with them, it means that he doesn't know how to use the bullypulpit of the president, and it means that he doesn't know how to use the 'carrot and stick' to get Congress to do what he wants. His inexperience is glaring. I'm writing in Ron Paul for president. Living here in New Jersey (ugh!), the state is guaranteed to go to Obama, so my vote doesn't make a damn bit of difference anyways. Ron Paul's mantra is to "stop telling people what to do!" I don't agree with many of his positions, but I do think that he is the best person for the job. I follow politics very closely, and although I'm just another asshole with an opinion, I at least think that it is an informed opinion.
Because the Obama administration is as pro big money corporations as they can get away with. Anything that would limit the scope of patents would harm their corporate cronies ability to make money hand over fist. It's corruption, plain and simple.
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While it might hurt the predatory aspects of Monsanto's business model, a ruling that a patent holder explicitly permitting GMO seeds to be sold intermixed with other seeds as "commodity seeds" allows purchasers of the commodity seeds to use them in the way they were used here, it wouldn't destroy the food crop industry, or even the GMO food crop industry.