Wasn’t a “drive-by”.
I used it as an example. You were down for the hijack.
If you want to discuss it start a new thread.
The Schmeiser decision can be found in its entirety here.
Unless the recitation of the fact finding in the decision is badly askew, it’s pretty clear that Schmeiser intentionally propagated canola he knew to be Monsanto’s patented variety. In '97, more or less by accident, he discovered while spraying Roundup around some power poles that some canola plants survived. So he sprayed several acres of that canola field with Roundup, and two-thirds or so survived. Then he harvested that particular plot and kept the seed from it separate, and used it to seed in '98.
How the stuff came to be in his field in '97 is more or less immaterial. There’s a variety of possibilities, but canola is notoriously prone to “volunteering” - which is to say that any scattered seed is likely to germinate next spring, regardless of what else is done to the field in question. It’s not particularly uncommon to see a field of wheat or whatever with thick strips of canola growing, marking the locations of swathes from the previous fall that were subject to a heavy rain or some such which cracked open the seed pods. If Monsanto had sued him for having grown the canola in '97, which he discovered by accident, then I’d be in complete agreement that it was a load of bullshit. But they sued him for growing canola from the seed he’d saved in '97, which he knew to be Roundup Ready[sup]TM[/sup]. He knew perfectly well what he was doing. I suspect he thought that since he’d never signed an agreement with Monsanto, as anyone who purchases from them must, that he was free to do as he pleased with the RR canola that he’d discovered growing in his field. But Monsanto’s seed wasn’t just protected by the sales contracts, but also by the patent, and so he was infringing.
And for the record, I’m no fan of Monsanto’s, though I’m not opposed to GM crops.
I have seen several programs on the subject, i believe including 60 minutes. In some cases if an organic farmer was being contaminated, his product was being hurt. They still lost.
Monsanto - Wikipedia here is a Wiki with the cases.
Thank you for your reporting on the decision. This leaves me with one hypothetical: if it was okay for the farmer to use RoundUp on his field in 1997, isn’t a farmer typically typically always free to use retained seed to replant his field the next year? If Monsanto’s products contaminated his field such that he was unable to retain seed for the next year without violating Monsanto’s patent on RoundupReady plants, hasn’t Monsanto done the farmer some material harm in forcing him to not retain seed and buy it next year? Obviously, his next batch of seed doesn’t need to come specifically from Monsanto, but he’s being forced to make capital outlays he could have otherwise avoided.
Recent case history has demonstrated that it’s hard to successfully sue Monsanto for contaminating your crops with their patented genes, so how is this fair?
Well, according to what’s said in the decision, Schmeiser only sprayed a small strip along the road beside one of his fields - some five acres out of a couple thousand. And reportedly the canola that survived the Roundup was mostly along the edge of the field, tapering off fairly rapidly. So there was lots of non-Roundup Ready crop to keep seed from.
Moreover, if Schmeiser hadn’t sprayed that strip with Roundup, most likely Monsanto would never have heard about him, and he could have continued on his merry way without a bother. Monsanto was tipped off in this case, and the only way anyone would know that Schmeiser was growing Roundup Ready canola would be if someone observed him spraying that strip (highly, highly unusual to spray healthy non-GM crop with Roundup) or he or his hired help talked about what they did. The latter is my guess, but who knows. Anyways, Schmeiser’s troubles were the result of him intentionally cultivating RR canola. If he’d just been accidentally cultivating it, I strongly suspect things would have come out differently.
I believe right now, pretty much all canola contains some (mostly small) percentage of genetically modified stock. So pretty much everyone not buying Monsanto seed is technically infringing their patent. But unless you intentionally produce yourself some pure GM seed (wouldn’t be hard, make a small plot somewhere, spray it, take the survivors and use them to build up a stock of seed) and then grow it on a large scale and use glyphosphate for weed control, I don’t think Monsanto is likely to come after you.
I don’t get their claims. How can you patent a gene? Masanto didn’t make the EPSPS gene or the resultant protein.
If some of Masanto’s magic seed drifts into your land, by wind or bird shit, you are cupable in court if it is grown and used. How absurd. Just because there is a “patented gene” in a cell doesn’t prevent the plant (you know, an organism) from dispersing seed or pollen. Someone ought to beat that Judge over the head with a science textbook.
Creating a genetically modified organism is not necessarily unanalogizable to inventing a new machine. Widget A inserted into Slot B produces Useful Effect C. That would have happened no matter who did it, but we decided that the guy who does it first gets a monopoly for 20 years. That’s the essence of a patent.
The defendants aren’t being held liable for something that happened on accident. They’re being held liable for intentionally taking advantage of drift in order to practice Monsanto’s patents.
Oh?
bolding mine
I can’t believe that no lawyer has been crafty enough yet to bring a class action suit against Monsanto for attacking their natural crops. A farmer can’t beat Monsanto. A whole bunch of them probably could.
So, this farmer discovered he had some plants on his property that had a desirable trait, and he saved seeds from those plants to grow more of them. There’s a word for that behavior, but it’s not “theft”. The word for that is “agriculture”. That’s how we got canola (and almost every other food crop we have) in the first place.