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Supreme Court Rules For Monsanto In Patent Case
Pigskin-Referee writes in with news of the Supreme Court's decision in a dispute between Monsanto and an Indiana farmer over patented seeds. "The Supreme Court has sustained Monsanto Co.'s claim that an Indiana farmer violated the company's patents on soybean seeds that are resistant to its weed-killer. The justices, in a unanimous vote Monday, rejected the farmer's argument that cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator are not covered by the Monsanto patents, even though most of them also were genetically modified to resist the company's Roundup herbicide. Justice Elena Kagan says a farmer who buys patented seeds must have the patent holder's permission. More than 90 percent of American soybean farms use Monsanto's 'Roundup Ready' seeds, which first came on the market in 1996."
The simple matter is that the farmer's recourse is to now sue the seller (operator of the grain elevator), for selling seeds he is not authorized to sell, resulting in damages xzy as stipulated in the costs of the lawsuits the farmer had to defend itself against.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
As much as the idea of patented seeds is ridiculous and dangerous (IMO), this particular argument wasn't going to fly.
The more important part of the decision (FTA): "But Kagan said the court's holding only "addresses the situation before us."" There was no wider ruling on whether seeds are patentable as IP or anything sweeping like that.
If he gets any cross pollination from other farmers using monsanto seeds, he'll get sued again. And he will lose. Farmers always lose these lawsuits where their fields got cross-pollinated by patented genes.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
But in this case...the product replicates ITSELF.
That's the difference.
If Monsanto doesn't like it..why don't they make their genetically modified crops self-terminating?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Have any farmer groups tried turning the tables, and suing MONSANTO for putting a product out, that infects a farmers non-gmo plants? Shouldn't Monsanto be required to make sure their products self terminate, and can't spread to 'infect' regular crops?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why isn't the farmer using regular seeds?
The problem here - He did use "regular" seeds: "cheap soybeans he bought from a grain elevator". Monsanto seeds don't come out an easily-identifiable fluorescent purple, he had no way of knowing which seeds came from Monsanto licensees and which came from traditional seeds.
For all of post-nomadic human history, farmers have taken a small portion of last year's harvest and used it to plant this year's crop. Standard Operating Procedure.
Unfortunately for we mere humans, Monsanto couldn't have begged for a better "test" case to go before the USSC. Even I have difficulty feeling bad for Farmer Dale, given that he deliberately tried to reproduce Monsanto's IP commercially without licensing it. But the underlying idea of taking seeds from the community hopper and planting them, perfectly kosher. It completely disgusts me that this case effectively sets a precedent, placing on the farmer the burden of separating the non-fluorescent-purple Monsanto seeds from the non-fluorescent-purple legal-to-grow seeds.
Far more disturbingly, though - Apply this same legal precedent to genetic therapies for human disease. A custom gene patch cures Alzheimer's forever? Great! Except - Hope you remember to pay your yearly license fee, because Pfizer owns your kids.
You know what else expires? Roundup's usefulness,
The backstory: Roundup is a weedkiller. It's also a plant killer. So Monsanto developed a soybean with roundup resistance. Lazy (uh, I mean efficient) farmers could just spray roundup everywhere to kill off the weeds.
If you've heard of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, you know what happened next.
So now you have roundup-resistant super weeds and farmers need to manually weed their crops. By the time the patent expires, there will be no advantage over heirloom soybeans (well, if you can even find heirloom soy beans).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Everyone screamed at Monsanto for developing the terminator trait in seeds, because everyone thought it would be used to stop farmers from saving seed. Monsanto dropped it, partly from bad press, partly because the trait was a bit too sensitive to temperature to be reliable. The thing is, traditional hybrid seeds already tend to lose their carefully selected traits if you save them and plant another generation. If you want to save seed you would want to start with a stable variety in the first place.
How does this help anyone?
Well, obviously it helps Monsanto as a company, and all of their employees involved in GMO product development, marketing, sales, and the relevant office staff who work in a supporting role. Those people far outnumber the numbers employeed by this particular farmer.
A local farmer is just trying to feed mouths and make ends meet yet the Big Pharma et al get to shit all over the little man once again
Or, you could look at it as one person trying to take food from the mouths of everyone working at Monsanto (who is not a pharmacutical company BTW). If this farmer had been allowed to do this legally, then Monsanto (and other seed companies that use GM technology, which is most of them) would have to take a serious look at whether they could afford to develop new GM traits. GM seed development and approval costs millions of dollars and takes about a decade. If it became legal to buy GM seeds intended for milling and then plant them, then the price for new seeds would no longer be able to support future developments. That would cost the jobs of thousands of crop geneticists, supporting staff, sales staff, etc. Even if you don't like GM on principle (which is stupid, myopic, and decidedly anti-science), those are a lot of people who depend on the current system.
What little faith I have left in humanity is quickly diminishing due to these wankers
It is people such as yourself who are far more dangerous to MY faith in humanity. You obviously have no direct connection to agriculture, and that's OK. Only about 1.2 to 1.5% of Americans are involved in any form of food production. However, you are a strong, vocal critic of a field about which you know next to nothing. In fact, it is probably safe to assume that you don't even know enough to be aware of how little you know (something mention here on /. not too long ago). I don't tell teachers how to teach, or mechanics how to fix cars. I don't tell lawyers what the law says, or engineers which rocket fuel is best to get us back into space. I'd appreciate it if you would at least talk to the professionals in the field before believeing whatever half-baked hack-job of a documentary or website it was that gave you the misguided impression that you actually understand anything about agriculture or GM crops.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I frequently hear this claim, and I frequently hear the other side declare that it's bullshit. Neither side actually cites a court case. Does this actually happen, or not?
Of course not. How could anyone cite a court case that doesn't exist?
When pressed, the claimers usually cite the case of Percy Schmeiser, the farmer portrayed in the film "Food Inc.". But what Schmeiser actually did was take deliberate action over a number of years to isolate and concentrate the RR genes by repeatedly spraying his crops with glyphosate herbicide to kill off any non-GMO plants. We was sued for blatant, intentional infringement. Yet he is still the default poster child for how Monsanto is victimizing poor innocent farmers.
And rightly so; the genes can spread, devastating natural crops, leaving Monsanto as the controlling entity of all food seed. "But how is Monsanto supposed to make money if it can't control gene spreading by either force of patents or by use of dangerous terminator genes?" That's not society's problem. Monsanto owns PepsiCo et al. They have sufficient assets to make profit without having to turn to comic book super villainy.
On the other hand we have Monsanto who spent millions of dollars creating genetically modified seeds that are resistant to their herbicides. There needs to be a way for them to make a profit from that investment.
The issues; If there is no patent protection the seed manufacturer would have to make all their investment back in one year as any subsequent seeds can be saved and re-sold by farmers. Where is the incentive to invest in the technology if there is no way to benefit from it?
The logical fallacy here is that selling the seeds is the only way they profit from this. The true fact is that they created the seeds to sell Roundup, which previously could not be used by farmers without killing the crops. They discovered that because of how fucked-up patent law is, they could also force the farmers to re-buy the seeds from them every year, in addition to buying the Roundup.
This is not an issue of Monsanto not getting their money out of the research - the yearly sale of Roundup in vast quantities to the farmers does that. It's an issue of Monsanto using a broken patent system to double-dip into farmers' pockets after locking them into the seeds.
Its worse than that. When monsanto's "patented" pollen contaminate non GMO plants, the offpring is suddenly monsanto's property.
Oh BS. There are plenty of high yield seed varieties that aren't own by Monsanto or anyone else. Besides 'Roundup Ready' is just a gene for Roundup resistance and the weeds have already appropriated said gene for their own purposes, thankyouverymuch. The way to feeding the world's poor is not to rely on herbicide resistance.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
> Just remember that without those higher crop yields,
This isn't about "higher crop yields". This is about selling more Roundup. In case you don't know what that is, it's a herbicide that would burn your throat if you got a whiff of it.
Let's not kid ourselves that there is any altruistic motivations at work here.
Genetic manipulation of seeds is done by poison salesmen, not farmers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You've not heard of "drift" have you (which I appreciate is not what happened here), where the non-GMO crops are cross pollinated by GMO crops. Then Monsanto (among others) sue the hapless farmer, take his farm and throw him off his own land. All because that's the way nature works.
Also by "plenty" I assume you mean less than 10% as per the article.
not true and not related to the actual facts of the case. while monsanto deserves a lot of bad press, and is an abusive company, /. suffers from too much knee jerk monsanto bashing without regard to the facts.
whether you like them or hate them is irrelevent. you dont get to ignore the facts.
or as a intelligent man once said: you have hte right to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Monsanto's monoculture crop is a global disaster waiting to happen. The first disease that comes along which has evolved to target Monsanto's GM plants will wipe out a HUGE portion of the world's food supply.
But what if some human disease was engineered and passed around the globe in an epidemic which rendered people allergic to Monsanto's GM crops? Now we've got a world of useless and even dangerous plants which are essentially out of control.
And to top it all off? You might be able to sue all the sick people who contract the disease! :) Did you forget to patent the genetic material of your new disease?
What you've just described is normal selective breeding, as practiced in agriculture for thousands of years. If he had discovered that some of his crop had a naturally-occurring resistance to glyphosate (I'm so pissed I won't even say the brand name!) and selectively bred his crop to express that gene, that would be no problem. And that's exactly what he actually did do, except that his seed stock was contaminated with genetically-modified trash seeds. How the fuck is that his fault?
In other words:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Why do Monsanto execs get to go through life fucking everyone and everything in their path and nothing can be done about it?