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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"
Did you read TFA? The farmer knew exactly what he was doing and was trying to get around the patent to save money... he got caught.
The bigger issue here is:
Monsanto has a policy to protect its investment in seed development that prohibits farmers from saving or reusing the seeds once the crop is grown. Farmers must buy new seeds every year.
That's a very harsh policy and they probably charge a premium for their seed, it must be tough to be a farmer nowadays.
"Big Pharma"... more like "Big Farm, eh?"
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The organic farmer selling non-GMO crops who sues for damages 'cause his plants are cross-pollenated by a neighboring farmer using GMO seeds who doesn't follow the guidelines for planting a barrier row of non-GMO plants around the edges of his field.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Doesn't this violate the first sale doctrine?
The first sale doctrine gets you out of licensing terms but it doesn't allow you to make more copies of the patented article:
The bigger issue here is:
Monsanto has a policy to protect its investment in seed development that prohibits farmers from saving or reusing the seeds once the crop is grown. Farmers must buy new seeds every year.
Only farmers that sign a contract with Monsanto are bound by this agreement. If you want to save your own seeds, you are free to do so. The defendant in this case was NOT sued for just planting seeds that happened to be GMO. He was sued for deliberately spraying his crop with glyphosate herbicide to kill non-RR plants in order to isolate the RR gene, and then he saved the resulting 100% RR beans and planted them the following year. Portraying him as an innocent and unwitting victim is absurd. He knew exactly what he was doing.
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.........
it must be tough to be a farmer nowadays.
Which is why farmers use seeds with GM traits. These traits reduce many of the input costs (fertilizer, fuel, time, pesticides, etc.) associated with growing soy and corn.
Farmers are professionals, and they are more than capable of making decisions about which technologies to adopt for themselves. These are not victims FORCED to buy something against their will, but reasonable people who weigh the costs and benefits of each technology and make their own determinations of the value. My group sells to many of these farmers (on the animal production side), and they are not passive sheep buying whatever our salesmen tell them is best. They do their homework, run the numbers, bargan hard and play one vendor against another just like any other procurement officer, because it is their own money on the line.
Fact is, farmers have been buying new seeds every year for far longer than GM seeds have been commercially available. I could be mistaken, but i belive that contracts prohibiting keeping seeds also pre-date GM seeds. Seed companies have made their money for decades by developing deep crop improvement research and development pipelines. Because they hire lots of PhD carrying crop geneticists, they can generate more improvement from year to year than a farmer can do on his own, with his already limited time. This enables farmers to outsource their crop improvement to specialists who are more efficient, allowing them to devote more effort on what they are best at, Growing the food. GM is just a new tool to help the seed companies, and the farmers that buy their seeds achieve the goals they have been pursuing for years.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
Though true, it's also a pretty good implication that seeds are patentable as IP, because patent ineligibility would be something the Supreme Court could raise sua sponte (deciding an issue on their own initiative, as opposed to merely deciding issues addressed by the lower court).
Copying a peice of work on a computer still requires you to do it. Their plants require nothing but mother nature.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
I agree with the other posters that THIS case certainly seems like the defendant was trying to avoid paying for a copyrighted good. However, what I don't understand is that a seed differs from most other copyrighted works in a very special way: it is self replicating. It would be as if I made a useful piece of software that sends out copies of itself to random people (aside from its useful part). Then when I found someone who was using one of the copies it sent out I would sue them. This sounds like how the RIAA would upload songs to torrent sites then sue the people who downloaded them. How is this reasonable? Sure Monsanto has a patent on the genes (something I also disagree with) in the seed but it is putting those genes into a product which spews itself out into the world. Shouldn't a patent/copyright holder hold some responsibility for not disseminating their own product?
http://nelsonfarm.net/issue.htm
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
> Neither side actually cites a court case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser
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
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.
I am not clear on this farmer’s specific case, but Monsanto has lost all rights to protect its patent on any seeds that it allowed to be planted in a non-environmentally control environment, AKA outdoors. Our legal system cannot supersede the basics facts of nature.
If you allow your patented seeds to be planted out doors and allow their pollen to escape freely into the wind, you have no right to tell anyone that they have no right to use seeds produced from their own non-Monsanto plants that happened to have been inadvertently pollenated by Monsanto’s insufficient processes and out right failure to adequately protect its own patent. At best the only recourse that Monsanto has is to fully compensate the lost seed and potential crop of any person that has seeds of this kind in exchange for destroying them.
Monsanto cannot legally protect a patent for seed that they have knowing allowed and opening allowed to enter the world’s ecosystem. There are forces there that no court has the juristiction to control. This is not as simple as returning a lost bag of money found on the side of the road. This is Mother Nature doing what it does. Monsanto is aware of this issue and knows how to protect their patent by only allowing their seeds to be planted inside environmentally controlled green houses. This is a failure on their part to protect their patent.
By the way Monsanto did not create the genes that make this seed resistant. They genes came from another public plant that anyone can own. All they truly should have been allowed to patent was the process of adding the genes to the soybean. They don’t own the genes; and no court has the authority to give the sole right to use the genes to anyone entity. The genes are publicly owed when in the original plant or any other plant that nature choses.
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!
The plants may require nothing but mother nature, but in this case the farmer did a lot of work to propagate them, actively sowing, harvesting, saving them, and resowing them for 8 generations.
What you describe is not illegal, and if he had merely done what you describe he would not have been sued. What you leave out, is that during each of those generations he sprayed his crop with glyphosate (the herbicide in Roundup) to kill any non-GMO plants and isolated and concentrated the patented gene, while simultaneously benefiting from the patent by ridding his fields of weeds in a way that someone using non-RR seeds would not be able to do. The issue here was active, deliberate and sustained infringement. Planting random seeds, and even replanting those seeds if grown without active use of the RR properties, was not an issue in this case. I have never heard of any case where Monsanto has sued anyone for unintentional infringement, despite lots of mythology to the contrary.
The courts at all three levels noted that the case of accidental contamination beyond the farmer's control was not under consideration but rather that Mr. Schmeiser's action of having identified, isolated and saved the Roundup-resistant seed placed the case in a different category. The appellate court also discussed a possible intermediate scenario, in which a farmer is aware of contamination of his crop by genetically modified seed, but tolerates its presence and takes no action to increase its abundance in his crop. The court held that whether such a case would constitute patent infringement remains an open question but that it was a question that did not need to be decided in the Schmeiser case.(Paragraph 57 of the Appeals Court Decision[6])
So, in Canada at least, it's still an open question then. Thanks.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
It's like Dick Cheney's dog sh*ts in your yard and suddenly your house belongs to Dick Cheney.
Never mind the Frankenstein stuff. THIS is the real problem with patenting life.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sorry, but the patent only applies to the seed made/raised by Monsanto.
Once it's been through a single planting / harvesting - it is no long the exact same seed - mutations have set in.
Unless it is 100% genetically identical to the seed sold by Monsanto, whether or not it carries the RR gene sequence is irrelevant - the patent applies to the entire gene sequence, not just the bit that makes it RR.
So once a single dna chain is modified (ie through natural selection) - it is no longer the patented product.
End of story.
The judges are WRONG.
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.
While I have no love lost for Monsanto and their IP enforcement goon squad, the herbicide in question is a pretty benign substance to work with. Check out the glyphosate page on wikipedia for an overview of it's activity and interaction with people. While it's not something you'd want to intentionally ingest, it's not a potent inhalation or other hazard.
Actually, could such farmers potentially sue Monsanto for polluting their fields?
Yes and no. Yes, because at least one farmer has actually done so, and won $660. No, because that was a default judgement in small claims court, and sets no precedent. If Monsanto had showed up and actually taken the suit seriously, it is unlikely he would have won. The reason is that the cross pollination causes no monetary damage. If a farmer is growing organic soybeans, they are still considered organic even if they contain some incidental pollination from RR fields. If you can't show damages, you have no case.
Yes, he was deliberatly trying to get around the patent. But he was doing so with techniques that have been unequivocally legal for millenia. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to replant seeds from last year. A decade ago, no one would have questioned that it was legal to select for herbicide resistance by spraying plants and keeping the ones that lived. Now those things are illegal.
The US government and Monsanto have clearly overstepped the limits of legitmate power. This is why we have the 9th and 10th amendments. Portraying Monsanto as an innocent and unwilling victim is absurd. They know exactly what they are doing, destroying traditional agriculture for their own profit.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Turns out, the patent expires soon. Monsanto seems to be pretty reasonable about it:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/roundup-ready-patent-expiration.aspx
After patent expiration, you can use the old soybeans royalty free. Or you can choose the newer, higher-yield varieties they have constructed since (and that will themselves expire at some point).
Seems to me the patent system here is actually working as it should.
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?
They were selling the soybeans for 'feed, milling, and other uses'. Not for seed to be planted.
Well clearly Monsanto need to add DRM to their seeds because we can't have people buying seeds and then using them in an unlicensed fashion. I suppose the method that would work best in this case is to install a root kit.
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