Monsanto thinks its theirs, and they've got a non-trivial legal argument behind their contention. They'll take you to court to enforce their rights, just like the farmer will if you trespass on his land or try to worm your way out of a purchase contract if prices go down, or if he thinks you did those things.
If Monsanto is wrong and they have no such legal right, that's fine. They'll lose in court, or at least they ought to. But you're making it seem like we should put a thumb on the scale in favor of farmers, just because they're farmers. Everyone takes advantage of the law when it serves their purposes. Indeed, a tremendous amount of law is traceable to serving the purposes of farmers (versus say hunters/gatherers). Indeed, even things we think of as modern instruments, like derivatives contracts, have their roots in farming.
I should note: I don't disagree that Monsanto shouldn't have a claim when farmers don't know their seeds have GMO DNA, either as a result of cross-pollination or not knowing the origins of the seeds. I think it's a weakness of the patent system that "intent" doesn't count for anything.
Indeed, a tremendous amount of law is traceable to serving the purposes of farmers (versus say hunters/gatherers).
This might be one of my all-time favorite HN comments, because it's caused me to imagine how weird real property would look to the hunter-gatherer only used to personal property, and all the arguments they would use to make against the concept of real property.
One can see the hunter-gatherers gathered up around Hunter News long ago:
* Some farmer somewhere has decided that the crops he just left laying around are somehow his! Well, that makes no sense. If they were his, he should have kept them on his person! Everyone knows that! It's perfectly obvious that things you leave lying around belong to everyone and the next person who can pick it up gets to use it!
* They call it "real property" but it's not "property" -- you can't take it with you! Duh!
* Oh, sure, they try to say the ways it's like personal property, like the person who made it has a moral right to it, or that they wouldn't have built that house if they didn't get to keep it. Balderdash!
* Someone explain to me why you even need "real property" for society to function. It seems we didn't have it for thousands of years and everything worked okay!
* Did you know that under "real property" you can be excluded from certain land, just because someone else "says" it's theirs?
* What are they going to do, put a cop on every single piece of land to make sure no one trespasses? This will collapse under its own weight.
> * Did you know that under "real property" you can be excluded from certain land, just because someone else "says" it's theirs?
The interesting part is that most developed countries do still have structures in place to explicitly restrict the ability of landowners from preventing access to certain land. Either in the form of laws, or through public ownership.
E.g. in Norway there's a concept called "allemannsretten" ("public rights") that explicitly guarantee the right of the public to access "utmark" which is effectively any non-built-up part of land outside of urban cores. On top of that, there are special building restrictions on building near the coast line to ensure public access to beaches or the sea in general. Not only can you walk through any forest you please, no matter whether someone owns it, but you can gather berries or mushrooms there without obtaining permission. You do however generally need their permission to hunt.
In the US and elsewhere it is more commonly provided for through massive government ownership. E.g. federal land in the US makes up a massive 28% of the land mass. In the UK the Crown Estate owns more than half the coast, and massive amounts of other land, etc.
But while we've shifted substantially towards favouring private land owners, we still recognise that unfettered private property rights substantially restricts the freedom of movement of others.
You just moved the goalposts. In the comment Rayiner replied to, you invoked us-vs-them, but when challenged, you retreat to a substantive claim. Why not just concede his point and move on with your broader argument?
I don't think it was me that moved to the 'trespassing' analogy.
Monsanto claims those seeds are their intellectual property, when actually it is the process of modifying the seeds that they came up with. So they are claiming trespassing where in my view there is no such thing happening, they are claiming trespass on a public road.
The groups of people that I indicated that were splitting legal hairs over this can be divided into those that make a living splitting legal hairs and those that make a living plowing earth. If you feel that the latter are undeserving of protection against the former then fine, I concede. Personally I think that they should be allowed to get on with their lives without the IP battle being extended to their fields (pun intended).
It serves no purpose and I don't think that anything good can/will come of it, and potentially some very bad stuff may be the end result.
Now you're back to your original argument, which is that farmers are morally superior to lawyers because they plow the earth. How can that possibly make sense? There are legal protections that should be enjoyed by farmers but not lawyers?
That was Rayiner's response to you and it seems self-evidently true. We strive towards a rule of law, not a rule of farmers, or a rule of philosopher kings who pick the meritorious occupations and penalize the rest.
Vernon Bowman didn't simply plant Roundup-Ready seeds by accident. He purchased clearly-marked Roundup-Ready seeds at commodity seed prices and then sprayed his fields with glyphosphate-based herbicides to take advantage of it. That isn't Monsanto's contention; Bowman admits to having done it. Maybe he's right and there's a patent exhaustion claim that makes doing that lawful, but it's hard to argue that Monsanto shouldn't have their day in court to verify it.
> but it's hard to argue that Monsanto shouldn't have their day in court to verify it.
No, it's in fact very easy to argue that. And in case you failed to notice that was exactly my point. Farmers work their ground, they've been doing so for many thousands of years.
Intellectual property and farming should be mutually exclusive fields, anybody should be able to grow anything to the best of their ability without the fear of being sued. I know that you disagree with this, that you believe that it is A-ok for big company 'x' to sue farmer 'y' for violation of their intellectual property (assuming for the moment that such a thing exists) but I'd much prefer for things not to be like that. It's an opinion, you can disagree with it but you can't disallow me to have that opinion or 'force me to concede a point' in which I do not believe.
The rule of law should not extend to your ability to grow food from seeds, to royalties paid on such seeds or to any derivative thereof.
Here you restate the moral superiority of farming over IP enforcement, but miss the fact that were your principle made the law of the land, there would be no Roundup-Ready seeds for Bowman to have planted. Again, the facts of this case are that Bowman directly benefited from Monsanto's product.
Incidentally, the rule of law's grip on the seed trade is centuries (millenia?) old. Agriculture is a very big part of the reason we have law to begin with.
> but miss the fact that were your principle made the law of the land, there would be no Roundup-Ready seeds for Bowman to have planted.
Yes, so he would have planted some other seeds instead. Problem solved. See, farmers will pick that which gives them the best yield, not that which holds the nicest bit of IP, their decision processes don't work in terms of royalties or intellectual property. Farmers buy seeds, farmers plant seeds, farmers tend their crops, harvest and then - hopefully, but definitely not always - make a profit.
What seeds they buy is up to the farmer, and if there had been no sign saying 'roundup ready', price 'x' and if the farmer would have not used roundup he'd be just as guilty according to the law since the law revolves around the fact that the seeds were not legally obtained.
This is so patently ridiculous that I find it somewhat disconcerting to see you arguing that that is a desirable situation. If you BUY something, especially something as basic as a seed you should not have to go and research the chain of events that led to those seeds being offered for sale and whether they are unencumbered from a legal point of view.
He didn't just plant the seeds! He used the entire Roundup-Ready system. Monsanto didn't go after him for accidentally ending up with seeds from their lineage.
If he had planted "some other seeds" and then sprayed them with glyphosphates, he'd have ruined his crop. If he had planted Roundup-Ready seeds and not used Roundup, Monsanto probably wouldn't have cared. I've read a bunch of filings for different Roundup cases, and in every one of the ones I've found, it's alleged that the farmers in question not only planted Roundup-Ready seeds, but also used Roundup instead of conventional herbicides.
> He didn't just plant the seeds! He used the entire Roundup-Ready system.
Yes, I know that. I was just trying to make you see that in the eye of the law that would not matter. The seeds are the problem, not the whole process, it all revolves around the seeds.
> If he had planted "some other seeds" and then sprayed them with glyphosphates, he'd have ruined his crop.
Indeed.
> If he had planted Roundup-Ready seeds and not used Roundup, Monsanto probably wouldn't have cared.
Who knows, but it isn't material whether Monsanto 'cares' or doesn't. After all they're claiming IP rights in the seeds, that's the only thing that matters and they could do so in either case. Of course they would be much less likely to bring suit in that case because it would somewhat reduce their chance of winning wouldn't you say?
> I've read a bunch of filings for different Roundup cases, and in every one of the ones I've found, it's alleged that the farmers in question not only planted Roundup-Ready seeds, but also used Roundup instead of conventional herbicides.
Indeed. And so we are left with a very simple case abstract:
Should a farmer be able to grow any seed that he/she buys on the open market?
As far as you know, he is permitted to grow any seed he buys. I don't understand why this is so hard for you to see. There are two elements to each of these Monsanto cases:
(i) Unsanctioned planting of Monsanto-lineage seeds
(ii) Use of glyphosphate herbicide on the resulting crop
BOTH elements are present in these cases. Not just one.
What else are people going to do with seeds, other than plant them?
And use whatever herbicide works best with these seeds, it's only best practice after all.
Since when does anybody need permission from some company before they can put a seed in the ground?
What if there is a famine, would you allow that farmer to plant the seeds, or would you happily stand by while justice has its day and these evil seeds are destroyed so that Monsanto's legally granted rights are not infringed on?
Really, the world is turning into a stranger place every day that I live in it.
I don't care how weird that sentence is, because by itself, planting unsanctioned seeds doesn't get you sued.
By all means, use whatever conventional herbicide works best on the resulting crops. Just don't spray them with the patented chemical that would kill any soybean that wasn't covered by Monsanto's patent.
The world hasn't been turned upside-down by novel applications of the law. It's been turned upside-down by massive investments in biotech that have enabled us to create magical crops that thrive despite being sprayed with extremely potent herbicides. Your argument here is an appeal to tradition and it's entirely misplaced.
I see lots of computer people do this when discussing a legal case: break it down into little pieces and then insist that each individual piece isn't a crime. (I mentally call it decomposition but law students might have a better term.) Like there must be exactly one sudden event that snaps the behavior from legal to illegal.
They are right that usually each individual piece isn't a crime. But someone can perform 15 acts, each of which, in total isolation, would be legal, but end up in a significant illegal act. As that someone performs more and more of those acts, they move from legal behavior, to probably legal behavior, probably illegal behavior, to probably illegal behavior but with minuscule damages, to illegal behavior with serious damages.
> Now you're back to your original argument, which is that farmers are morally superior to lawyers because they plow the earth.
I don't see that claim anywhere in the message you replied to. I see a claim that he believes that someone should be able to buy seeds and use whatever herbicides one wants with them without a risk of being sued for IP infringements.
That is not an argument about the moral standing of either farmers or lawyers, but an argument about where he believes one of the restrictions on patents should be drawn.
