I hate Monsanto as much as everyone else but I agree with them in this case.
If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ?
I believe GM are a chance to humanity, with the potential to feed more and more people.
But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ?
And as far as I know, these seeds allow farmers to use massive doses of roundup, if this guy used some roundup on his crops it's fair to say he perfectly knows these were gm seeds and that he wasn't allowed to use it for free.
If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it and do like farmers always did, with standard seeds.
> If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ?
Since when does people have a right to make a profit, even if their business plan is stupid?
> But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ?
Because if you're not a totally evil bastard, you can still make a massive amount of money by creating a brand that ensures people trust you to always give them the best product?
How many people do you know that buy brand name Ibuprofen, for example, despite the fact that Boots, who found the compound and commercialized it, has not held a patent on it for decades? In fact they sold off their own premium brand (Anadin) a while back and now competes with their former brand with cheap generics that often costs a tenth or less of what Anadin charges for the same chemical compound, and still makes money off it despite competition from dozens of manufacturers.
It's possible some types of research would not pay without artificially jacked up prices like this, sure. Boots certainly would have made less from Ibuprofen without a patent initially.
But if these Monsanto seeds are so effective, then this patent acts as a de-facto tax on a whole range of foods, as unlike Ibuprofen, if they are effective enough to affect competition, "everyone" will need them. If they're not, it doesn't really matter if the R&D hadn't happened.
If it already acts like a tax, we might as well bring it under democratic control, and lose the competition distorting downsides of an artificial monopoly, by using already well established avenues for public funding of research to handle any shortfall in R&D funding from curtailing patent rights.
The agriculture industry is one of the largest recipients of government subsidies in the world as it is - shifting even a small percentage of those subsidies into funding R&D to make advances in seeds available to farmers cheaper would probably pay off.
> Since when does people have a right to make a profit, even if their business plan is stupid?
As long as it provides value for the society. If you allow farmers to replant seeds then Monsanto doesn't exist anymore.
Do you think it's better for the society? Well Monsanto isn't probably the best example because it's the worst company I can think of, but you get my point.
That's the same with vaccines, it costs a lot of money to develop, if you allow everyone to copy it then there's no market and no vaccines.
I see gm crops like a software license limited in time, it's not because we agree that you can use my software for a year that you have the right to use it for as long as you want. Don't like this business model ? Then don't use it.
> But if these Monsanto seeds are so effective, then this patent acts as a de-facto tax on a whole range of foods, as unlike Ibuprofen, if they are effective enough to affect competition, "everyone" will need them
So what? If a company build a harvester that improves harvest by 20%, am I entitled to steal it because it distorts the market?
I agree with you these technologies should be public and subsidized by the taxpayers because it benefits everyone. But people don't want to pay for it, and that's their right, so we use private companies that sell it to people willing to pay.
> If you allow farmers to replant seeds then Monsanto doesn't exist anymore.
Like I mentioned in another post, their seed division is over 100 years old. I don't think they are going to disappear overnight because a patent they recently acquired, relatively speaking, went away.
Their biggest sell is that they are able improve the yields on the crops year over year. Replanting the seed you grew last year will leave you falling behind the competition, and probably out of business after a few years. Just one bushel per acre difference means tens of thousands of dollars for the average farm. With razor thin margins, you cannot afford to miss that.
Also, Monsanto is a huge business. The thing they seem to be most excited about right now is their precision agriculture division. (i.e. applying electronics and software to grow better crops) Given the nature of this site, I'm sure you can see the potential there alone.
.. and this is the basic assumption of patents: They should provide value for society. If they don't, then they are a bad bargain and should be taken off the table. They are not some perpetual right. They are a grant from society in return for certain things. If the benefits don't exceed the costs or damages accruing from taking away the freedoms they curtail, then we should take these grants off the table.
> If you allow farmers to replant seeds then Monsanto doesn't exist anymore.
Someone else addressed that better than me.
> I see gm crops like a software license limited in time, it's not because we agree that you can use my software for a year that you have the right to use it for as long as you want. Don't like this business model ? Then don't use it.
... or change the law, to take this business model off the table, if the software company abuses the rights to place restrictions that we as a society finds not to be worth the benefits we get from it.
Again: They do not have a right to profit from their chosen business model when this business model is based on exploiting a grant of rights that depends on the restriction of the freedom of the public that society chose to offer with specific goals. They have a right - as long as we continue to offer that trade - to try to profit from it. But we also have a right to take that deal away if we don't benefit sufficiently from it, or if the restraints it adds prove too harsh.
> So what? If a company build a harvester that improves harvest by 20%, am I entitled to steal it because it distorts the market?
You miss the point entirely, which was that if we're already paying for this technology, then for society there is no cost saving in leaving the R&D to Monsanto vs. paying for it from public funds. And the argument
Such a simple phrase, so difficult to implement. In fact, the only true and proven method of valuing something, in History, has been the capitalist market. I think you accidentally supported the parent comment author's point.
Well I don't know your method of valuing something but if farmers want to pay for it (or "steal" it) I would probably say it brings some value to them.
Which point of the parent comment am I supporting exactly?
We both agreed these technologies shouldn't be developed for profit, I'd love to see some international organization doing the research and giving the results for free.
Actually I think it already exists, I can't remember exactly which organization but there are some non-profit groups researching better crops.
Wouldn't that apply to software & video media as well? AMC sells me a movie, then I copy it and send it to all my friends with no loss in quality for free. Companies then spend tons of money inventing DRM and copy protection techniques. Should Monsanto produce a modified seed that produces seedless fruit? Of course this wouldn't work for products where the seed is the consumable end result (soybean, corn).
It seems like Monsanto's business model is no better than our's (software) when one can copy the product easily and distribute it. The only difference is that there are very few seed manufacturers so Monsanto stands alone at trial. Suppose in the future when seed genetic programmers are as common as indie software shops, should these genetic programmers have similar IP protections that software people take for granted?
Monsanto makes money selling chemical pesticide (roundup, etc) that kills everything except their modified seed. So they can still make plenty of money selling the chemicals. Though this perpetuation of ever more toxic pesticides/herbicides in a war against evolution is eventually going to end badly.
> If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ?
There are a number of reasons why a farmer would want to buy from a seed company over producing their own. Monsanto's Dekalb seed division is more than 100 years old, which long predates these patent issues.
> If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ?
I'm not a biologist, but I assume it is possible to make 1G grains edible but infertile -- incapable of sprouting a new plant and/or growing 2G grains. That would render 1G grains useless for sewing, and still usable for anything else. Much like cross of horse and donkey is a viable, but infertile mule.
The way I imagine it, Monsanto have to grow two strains of grain, each giving viable grains when pollinated within the strain, but giving only infertile 1G seeds when cross-pollinated.
Of course that would generate extra costs for Monsanto: additional research, maintaining two separate strains and cross-pollinating them.
Because some stakeholders expressed concerns that this technology might lead to dependence for small farmers, Monsanto Company, an agricultural products company and the world's biggest seed supplier, pledged not to commercialize the technology in 1999.[2] Customers who buy patented transgenic seeds from Monsanto must sign a contract not to save or sell the seeds from their harvest,[3] which preempts the need for a "terminator gene".
The concern was that the "terminator" gene would force poor farmers to buy seeds every year, and they alleviated that concern by instead forcing poor farmers to buy seeds every year by contract?
Let me guess, the "stakeholders" we have in mind here are trial lawyers? Sometimes the technological solution really is better than the "social" solution. It leads me to wonder just how effective this terminator thing really is.
Well, it's like the ultimate genetic defect. So basically relying on the technological solution alone isn't going to last, because of all the billions of seeds... the ones which can reproduce will be the ones which do.
Hahaha, that's a handy redefinition of "genetic defect", but I doubt Steven Jay Gould would agree...
Actually the vast majority of soybeans are processed into useful products like shoyu, livestock feed, plastics, etc. If the viable soybean were a needle in a haystack, no farmer would bother looking for it.
Disclosure of bias: I'm ideologically against the idea of messing with fundamental aspects of life (and the basis of agriculture) for the purposes of copy protection. That said, I very much agree with you. I'd like to explain though and at least elaborate on my biases :)
What you might see would be e.g. the spread of the copyrighted genes without the terminator genes rather than some farmer grovelling through a pile of seeds trying to find something viable. Or descendants of copyrighted plants growing where they shouldn't be - because the ones that could, did. It seems to me that even if you have the terminator genes, as a "corporate innovator", you still need IP protection. A reasonable and conservative person should assume things fuck up at scale and especially with viral technologies like, say, life.
On the other hand, if terminator genes work well, they start looking like a bad idea. For a start they're strategically bad for any nation which might ever be at war or subject to terrorism, due to the fragility of centralised seed production and distribution.
Also, the idea that the terminator genes would spread to other plants (e.g. http://discovermagazine.com/2003/aug/featgenes which I never was too worried about) starts to look more like a real thing.
I appreciate that bias and appreciate your admission, but I don't share it. I view life as a hungry equilibrium. It has existed on this planet for a long time, and has endured much worse shocks than Monsanto can produce. In the long run biologists will simply see the contributions of intelligent life as another source of genetic variability. That isn't to say that humans always have good ideas about genetic changes: consider the dachshund. Only planetary-scale events have the potential to really screw things up for life per se.
I think we can agree that as harmful non-inherited transmissible genetic variation goes, the terminator gene (if it actually works; do we really know why Monsanto didn't buy Delta & Pine?) is probably the least worrisome. A gene that acts against reproductive fitness is not one that will ever be common in nature. As for other variations, patented or not, I expect most will be out-competed outside carefully controlled environments. Few domestic chickens live long in a predator-rich environment. Roundup tolerance itself is unlikely to enhance fitness in the absence of someone willing to pay Monsanto thousands of dollars every year. Those few human-created variations that can establish themselves in wild populations, if we ever discover such, I'm just going to call evolution. The spectre of the super-weed seems silly to me: the essence of a weed is that, in the absence of human intervention, it crowds out plants that humans like. Roundup is only agriculturally valuable for cultivation of varieties that tolerate Roundup; if weeds gained that tolerance it wouldn't be a net loss for humanity.
It's probably possible to do that with fruit (making seedless fruit), but probably not possible with edible seeds like soybean or corn. If we were playing God here, why didn't Monsanto just invent a plant that would produce all different kinds of fruit on one plant so that we didn't have to plant a bunch of different crops? It would be even better if the plant could position the fruit at known intervals on a branch to increase the speed of harvesting machinery.
So obviously some things aren't quite possible. Your suggestion is nice, but I don't think it's as easy as doing a few years of research.
I believe there is a variety of rice that is an infertile hybrid. I recall seeing it on some PBS show,l or similar, but don't have a reference at the moment.
Well, all I'm saying is if it were easy to do, Monsanto probably would have done it already to protect their business model. Unfortunately modifying DNA is not quite as easy as setting compiler flags.
I believe GM are a chance to humanity, with the potential to feed more and more people.
But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ?
And as far as I know, these seeds allow farmers to use massive doses of roundup, if this guy used some roundup on his crops it's fair to say he perfectly knows these were gm seeds and that he wasn't allowed to use it for free.
If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it and do like farmers always did, with standard seeds.