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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.
Since God used the first crop of seeds to produce new plants, I think the whole patent issue boils down to this infrigement made by nature or God. Since Monsanto can't sure nature, they will have go for the big man himself.
I think Monsanto needs to sue God or in his absence his nearest representative, the Pope, for making illegal copies of their seed.
SCOTUSblog
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
It seems earlier court decisions suggested that Monsanto had no rights after it made an initial sale. If this gets overturned then imagine the strengthening this might give to the First Sale Doctrine!
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
I am not surprised that a reactionary, right-wing administration would stand behind Monsanto.
Luckily, the elections are behind the corner and things are about to ch.. oh, shit!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The short version: Don't own his own seeds and once you buy Monsanto seeds they own your business ..
"A federal appeals court found that soybean farmer Vernon Bowman infringed on Monsanto patents when he planted second-generation soybeans that were the product of seeds he had purchased from Monsanto"
AccountKiller
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.
I didn't RTFA, but I'm assuming that the summary is correct where it says the Obama administration was opposed to SCOTUS hearing the case. What reason did they give for the case not being heard?
Why is the Obama administration trying so hard to stop the Supreme Court from hearing this case?
Can someone fill me in, please?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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
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.
I know what at least one of the justices will say:
When they get to Sam Alito, he'll point to Antonin Scalia and say, "Whatever he said."
You are welcome on my lawn.
Having been sued by Monsanto before, I certainly hope, but will not hold my breath, that the patents are ruled invalid.
My wife and I have 20 acres in rural country where we raise horses. They graze in our hayfields, which were contaminated by pollen from a nearby university where Monsanto does GMO research on insect-resistant hay and alfalfa.
We were sued by both the university and Monsanto, along with many of our neighbors, for "stealing their proprietary, top-secret technology."
Yeah, like we snuck into their fields in the middle of the night and stole pollen.
They're called bees.
Anyway, it cost us over $100K in legal fees, and were compelled to pay licensing fees. We decided to plow the hayfields under, but the court ruled we still had to pay annual licensing because the DNA was still in our soil.
Now we pay Monsanto $15K/year for the dirt on our property.
So if much of the commodity seed out there is now roundup-ready, farmers may have an increasingly difficult time buying non-modified seed. That means Monsanto would have poisoned the well of the competition: natural seeds. There are two monopolistic behaviors here: protecting your inventive production method and choking out competing production methods through non-market actions. Patents are only meant to support the former, not the latter. Fostering market competition between production methods (i.e. GMO vs. non-GMO seeds) is the implicit aim of patent law (by promoting the creation of new production methods to be market-tested). The fact that life-based patents have the capacity to cross-breed (literally crowd out) or, at the very least reproduce themselves (having a market-crowding-out effect) should give the courts serious pause in upholding them. Both of these are negative externalities born by consumers of the competing products. The practical implication for a win by Monsanto is that patenters making life-based modifications will seek to make those modifications cross-breedable and pervasive to the "competing" natural versions, since contaminating the natural version will amount to "expanding the user base."
Monsanto knows their genetic patent is being spread by bees, and yet either nobody is correctly arguing this in court or nobody cares. If someone sued on that issue alone Monsanto's patents would be declared invalid long ago. All these farmers who have had bee by plantings of monsanto's seeds into their crops would be owed a lot of money.
The summary states: "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."
And yet, the linked article makes no claim like that, nor does the summary provide a link to that. So, please, where is the citation to support that claim?
By Monsanto's logic, if some of my patented drink mix unintentionally found it's way into an aquifer, anyone who gets water from that aquifer owes me money if I demand it. Soon enough I'll own the water cycle!
Well, looking around the internets finds that the article and summary are in this case rather poor. Fortunately there are better sources, in this case a good Reuters article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/21/us-monsanto-lawsuit-idUSTRE78K79O20110921
In Bowman's case, he planted Roundup Ready seeds as his first-crop in each growing season from 1999-2007 and did not save seed in compliance with licensing agreements. But he also purchased commodity seed from a local grain elevator for a late-season planting, or what is known as a "second-crop."
The farmer applied glyphosate to his second soybean crops and was able to identify herbicide-resistant plants, from which he then saved seed for subsequent years of second-crop planting, according to the court documents.
So this is really a case over both patent exhaustion and contract law. It's interesting that the seed selection step is the same process that got Percy Schmeiser in trouble.
Its also worth noting that the Truthout.org claim that the Solicitor General "released a legal brief despite the fact that the US government was not a defendant in the case" is a bald-faced lie. The US government was the original defendant in the case at the trial level, which was a challenge that various government entities, particularly the US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, had violated the federal law in the process of approving Round-Up Ready Alfalfa without an Environmental Impact Statement. Monsanto was not an original party to the case at trial level, but was an intervenor at trial after the decision and in the remedy phase. The U.S. briefs at the Supreme Court were not non-party amicus briefs, they were briefs "for federal respondents". Documents relating to the case are available at SCOTUSblog.
There is probably justification for calling many "hybrid" crops today as genetically modified. That pretty much means that nearl 100% of today's food crops are GM in one way or another.
If you are concerned only with genetic manipulations that have been done in the last 20 years or so, you are probably missing the boat. The manipulations of plant genome over the last 150 years have been quite extreme and there are examples of creating non-viable forms. There is no indication that this sort of manipulation has ceased. So what do we do if a university creates a hybrid corn that seems to be ideal but has a nasty side effect? There isn't any formalized testing procedure for food crops, so creating corn that promotes cancer after 10 years is entirely possible - and it could easily spread throughout the entire food ecosystem.
The question then comes in, what constitutes adequate testing? Clearly we can see examples in nature that say even 20 years isn't enough. What needs to be tested? Well, considering that many hybridizations are just enhancing natural processes like cross-pollenization, it should be obvious that changes are going to happen whether we want them to or not. So how do we protect food crops from change? Short answer, unfortunately, is we cannot. We are going to have to either roll with the changes however they occur or we are going to have to move to a 100% synthesized food supply where the exact nature of it is 100% known and controlled.
In short, trying to "know" about GM is pointless. We aren't in control of our food supply and changes are going to creep in. Cross-pollination and hybridization can create as much havoc as GM and we have had people playing around with those in very uninformed ways for over a hundred years.
If Monsanto's seeds are patented (and I think it would be a cruel injustice if they are), then somebody ought to sue the ass off of that company for purposely littering neighbor's croplands with patented seeds that cause economic damage to neighboring farmers.
This is a clear case of right and wrong and Monsanto is wrong.