Really? Schmeiser forgot to mention pollination during his defense?
I don’t have easy access to Canadian court decisions, so I’ll rely on you to provide the specifics. But unless the Canadian system has some dramatic differences from our own, then Schmeiser had every chance to tell his side of the story, and Monsanto had to win by a preponderance of the evidence – not fifty-fifty, in other words; they had to overcome a presumption in favor of farmer Schmeiser.
But I did mention the fact that they’ve filed a mere 140 lawsuits on this issue in thirteen years, total.
That doesn’t suggest a massive onslaught of litigation.
Yeah. According to Monsanto, there have only been 9 trials, all of which they have won. I haven’t read all the decisions, but the Schmeiser case appears to have some biological flaws (pollination). However, they have sued over 150 farmers, most of which were settled out of court.
My mistake. They did consider pollination, albeit in an abbreviated, incomplete manner:
Random genetic mixing of susceptible plants with resistant plants would not necessarily lead to susceptible plants. It depends on the gene expression. And in any case, hybridization happens in nature all the time, with unpredictable genetic results.
I have no insights as to the nature of the Canadian legal system.
If only these lawsuits were the sum total of the story.
To me, there are two separate issues here.
One is what is patentable. To me it is only things that you create. You can patent a wing design you create, you cannot patent a hummingbird wing. You could patent a specific process using a hummingbird wing. From what you are saying it sounds like an abuse of the patent system. They did not patent a test for the gene (otherwise you would have to pay them to use the test for cholesterol purposes) they patented the knowledge of the gene’s operation. That is ridiculous.
The second is how patents are used. The Monsanto model may be one thing to look at, but the most egregious abuse I have heard of was a pharmaceutical company that patented a genetic test that would predict if one of their drugs would be affective. They did not offer the test nor would they let anyone else offer the test. Basically the point of the patent was to prevent doctors from using the test to eliminate their drug as an option for patients that would not be helped by it. That is just as evil as an oil company buying the patent to better battery just to stymie the development of electrical cars would be.
That looks like the long and the short of it, so I don’t see any kind of real parallel to Monsanto or companies that make genetically modified crops. Monsanto makes pesticide and then genetically engineers plants that won’t be harmed by the pesticide. (In some order.) This company had patents on specific sections of naturally occurring human genes - they’re not the only company with patents like this, by the way - and it created a test that looks for mutations on those genes. I assume if another company had tried to market a test that looked for the same mutations, they would have sued.
As far as Monsanto goes, the practice of suing farmers sounds abusive on the face of it, but companies often go to absurd extremes in the name of protecting their patents so nobody can claim they should be in the public domain. This may be another one of those instances.
The free market has nothing to do with this–a patent is a government-enforced monopoly. Once the patent has expired, then we will see how the free market handles it.
I’m kind of curious how Monsanto finds out about these farmers. Does Monsanto have people driving around and running into fields to steal corn (or whatever) for genetic testing? Wouldn’t that be against the law?
This claim and argument has arisen in every thread on the topic.
Unfortunatley, I have never seen the particulars of an actual lawsuit that supported this claim. Every time the citation makes it into a thread, the particulars of the case tend to indicate a different scenario such as that the “innocent” farmer had carefully harvested the cross-pollinated crops rather than selling them with the rest of his grain and had re-used the seed created from those rows to his own benefit.
Much like the claim that Wal-Mart “frequently” goes into a town and kills the competition with low prices, then closes/consolidates its stores into neighboring towns, there does not appear to be any evidence that the claims are based in fact rather than based in an anti-big company attitudes. (Wal-Mart and Monsanto are both large comapnies with a history of unethical practices, but the claims on these specific issues have not yet been supported by facts.)
But they, by their own admission, don’t do so themselves. They hire private investigators. Can they guarantee that their agents follow published corporate policy?
Ah, but I believe the burden of proof should not be on the farmer. The assumption should be that organisms will act the way that organisms act (they produce pollen, which is spread to other plants, resulting in reproduction). I quoted the portion of the Canadian court opinion that deals with how they determined that it was not cross-pollination, but the methodology and result interpretation are not clear at all.
If the investigators are authorized to take samples, it isn’t stealing. Could they be taking samples at other times? I guess so. That might be more trouble for them that it’s worth, but I don’t know.
If you create a useful gene from scratch (plausible, though I don’t know if it’s actually been done), you can patent the gene. If you find a gene one place in nature and discover that it would be useful transplanted into some other organism, you can patent the gene + organism combination, but that wouldn’t stop someone from using the same gene in some other way. And in any event, you can patent a process to isolate a gene, or to detect it, or to transplant it, which would stop others from using that process, but would still allow them to isolate, detect, or transplant it in some other way. It’s ludicrous, though, to claim that you can discover an already-existing gene and then patent the gene itself, and it’s nice to finally see some court decisions saying so.
It may not be stealing, but if the various complaints are to be believed, it may be trespassing. If agents acting on behalf of Monsanto are not following Monsanto’s published policy (permission of farmer or court order), but are getting samples in other ways, then Monsanto has plausible deniability AND the samples.
I don’t want to sound like a conspiracist, but Monsanto does not have a wonderful history of shooting straight with the public.
Even more ridiculous, one company can have a patent on the DNA sequence of the gene, while another has the patent on the corresponding protein sequence. Which is patently (heh, see what I did there?) absurd, since if you have one, then the other is a given (or at least, the DNA sequence is a functional given if you have a protein sequence). On top of that During my days doing FTO analysis on genes we were looking to express, I would also find patents on sequences of genes that were published years prior.
The whole gene patent area is a mess. It might be best to just invalidate all patents on naturally occurring gene sequences.