I can think of an extremely simple experiment that can be run on a field of unknown corn to determine if it is Roundup ready, in a few hours, with only the loss of a couple of corn plants and less than a teaspoon of Roundup.
I think it's pretty well stipulated in this case that the farmer knew the field was sown with Roundup-ready crops, and that the farmer deliberately employed Roundup to exploit that.
The farmer's argument was that they didn't sow those seeds deliberately, and that they should therefore be allowed to take advantage of the Roundup-ready properties of the field without paying licensing fees.
I don't have a strong opinion about the validity of that argument, except to note that Monsanto is in this case in a bind very similar to that of IP rightsholders. Seeds can be propagated like bits; in theory, that propagation occurs without any cost to Monsanto. But in practice, widespread unauthorized copying destroys the Monsanto business model.
The possibility of unintended propagation of Monsanto seeds probably makes them less sympathetic than IP rightsholders; nobody accidentally pirates a full-length movie.
how does this experiment have any relation to reality?
i think you're implying that this farmer happened upon an entire field of crops that he did not plant, then determined that this field was seeded using roundup-ready seeds, and then sprayed roundup on that field.
do you really think that the entire field was planted by the wind? do you think that this guy left his fields fallow and then the wind just seeded the entire thing? or that he planted his own seeds, but then the wind blew in enough seeds to displace enough of his crop that he could spray it with roundup and still have enough crop left for a good yield?
My observation is simply that the claim that it doesn't make sense for someone to serendipitously discover that their crops are Roundup-ready isn't really true. Is it the dominant-probability hypothesis? Heck no. It is, however, sufficiently likely that sooner or later it will happen.
In fact, if the genes get out there in the wild, and Monsanto de facto forbids people from discovering this fact, it isn't inconceivable that the genes could spread far and wide without anyone actually noticing until much later.
