How is it that Monsanto manages to stumble from one PR disaster to another?
Why do they insist on ruining my industry through ill-conceived litigatious strategies and horrible, stunningly stupid PR? When I say stunningly stupid PR I do mean it.
Is the company controlled, ** still ** by idjits? Does no one in this package of drooling fools understand what kind of horrible PR position we’re ** already in **? Have they not noted our sales fucking suck? (I mean industry wide) That no one trusts us? (Well, largely speaking) And our industry seems largely out of touch? And ** who ** is largely responsible for this!!!
Fuckers, Monstanto, I fucking hate you (not as much as my Swiss boss but pretty close).
Fickst du!
Oh my pain. ** Fuck fuck fuck. ** I think I’m going to change industries. It’s just not worth it.
I’m way to stupid to give your Biotechnic Majesty any advice but I do see your problem. Especically since I haven’t heard any more recent news on the Starlink corn thing. (I believe that’s the correct name.) None of this suprises me though. It has to be so much easier to sue a poor farmer for having wind blown spores on his land than suing a multi-billion dollar industry for polluting our food supply.
I guess you do realize that the average person knows about as much about this as they do any of the other types of ignorance you are always trying to fight.
OK, bad thread title to come across after reading about cloning, artificial insemination and similar crap. I envisioned a clean room bio lab with scientists trying to come up with the perfect aformentioned Motherfucking Drooling Moron.
Having checked out the link, all I can say is that Monsanto definitely has their heads up their butts, the court made a stupid decision, and the farmer would have made more money suing Monsanto for limiting the marketablility of his infected crop because so many places won’t accept genetically modified foods.
(Which I consider idiotic, and personally if it’s labeled as such I’ll go out of my way to buy it, not because it’s better, but because it’s as least just as good and I refuse to be another statistic in the “consumers won’t buy” category.)
Do I have this right? Wind blew pollen onto the farmer’s fields. He saved the seeds and used them the next year, as he has done every year since he’s been farming. And he got sued for violeting intellectual property rights?
First of all, doesn’t this play into all the fears of the “Frankenfood” crowd about how to contain and control the breeding of GM food with conventional varieties?
He didn’t even use the damned Roundup and they sued them??? Clearly the scientists over at Monsanto have conducted a horrible and failed genetic experiment on their own legal and PR departments.
Quarantine the lot of them, fumigate the office space, and try again. Sheesh.
I remember in the early to late eighties a series of TV public service anouncements concerning mail fraud; mainly, that if someone send you something in the mail that you didn’t order or ask for, you don’t have to pay for it.
Am I the only one who thought that people can go and plant their genetically-enhanced crops on someone else’s land, which them knowing, and then sue them a couple months later when it’s time to harvest?
Monsato should have controlled their plants. They failed. Tough shit for them, I say.
Matt, take your knee jerk reactions and ** fuck off **.
Manhattan:
My feelings exactely. They’re morons. The whole lot of them. I personally can advise them on a dozen different approaches. Fuckers. Idjits like this are ruining the industry. And the drooling moron in their PR department in Manitoba calls this a “victory”?! I gotta find a new line of work, I can see this is going to go from bad to worse.
** Monstanto **, the company that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Who can design a litigation and PR strategy guaranteed to make us all look like overbearing morons utterly insenstive to any concerns, Monsanto can!
While the factual situation is muddied, I’m still appalled by Monsanto’s approach.
We do need to protect the patent rights, and pirating is bad. However, strategies have to acknowledge our current poor PR position (where even if Monsanto’s story in re our farmer is 100% correct, we still have a PR disaster: appalling injustice, no, bad law, perhaps) and work to improve that.
The Monsanto strategy is simply going to produce further alienation.
I believe I heard on NPR’s All Things Considered this evening (technically it’s last evening, but I haven’t gone to sleep yet) that the farmer is countersuing. God bless him, I hope he does ill things to Monsanto. Here’s Cecil’s column about GM crops, which includes the "“fucking Monsanto’ argument,” though I see it’s been cleaned up for the web (Ukulele Ike, it wasn’t just the electric chair column).
Ah, I work for one of those monster biotech firms, my fucking Monsanto argument is not an argument with the rationalization of agriculture, but Monstanto’s particularly ham-handed idiot methods.
I think the complaints are somewhat misdirected. Sure, Monsanto is wrong, but they are not morons for suing this guy, they are trying to make money. The moron is the judge who found for Monsanto. I can’t believe any sane judge would do such a thing.
Let’s grant the Monsanto can patent their plant. Isn’t it incumbent upon them to prevent their patented genes from spreading to other farms? If Secretariat breaks out of his pen one night and impregnates the cart horse next door, does the cart horse owner owe Secretariat’s owner stud fees? Of course not…in fact the race horse owner could be liable for damages.
The problem is not Monsanto, although they are acting like jerks. The problem is that the judge was so stupid he awarded damages to Monsanto, not the farmer.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Lemur866 *
I think the complaints are somewhat misdirected. Sure, Monsanto is wrong, but they are not morons for suing this guy, they are trying to make money. …snip…
I differ.
Everyone in the industry is looking at our PR situation go from bad to worse. So, when you’re stuck in an unfavorable situation, you have to adopt. It does us no fucking good at all to have patents on seeds we can’t sell.
Somehow, the drooling morons at Monsanto have not figured out that alienating your marketplace through strong arm tactics is, well, fucking stupid!!!
What the fuck good is their motherfucking patent if we end up being locked out of the marketplace bec GM plant products are, to deform a phrase, persona non-grata.
Anyone outside of Monsanto would realize that we gotta play nice. Soothe, soothe. Sure, go after pirates, but carefully. Offer to buy out the seeds, any number of smiley face strategies, which simulataneously get us better press and also show you’re doing your due efforts to defend your IP.
Ohhhhhh. I’m gonna have an embulism over this.
(PS: Magdalene: why do you think I’m the boy who talks to the “responsible officials” – the charming me just doesn’t show up here on SDMB.)
Colly…I’m too lazy to look it up but is Monsanto responsible for the “golden rice” thing? There’s some controversy over that now too isn’t it? Something like the company is trying to push it’s sales in India and Indochina. Billing it as some kind of cure all for malnourishment. Even though a kid would have to eat 15 lbs. a day in order to get their daily allowance of beta k vitamins. Believe the deal calls for giving away the seed but charging for the goodies like herbicides and pesticides to bring it along properly. Opponents feel that these people would be better served by encouraging them to grow more varied fruits and veggies which certainly would eliminate the need for some half assed modified product. This isn’t a PR success story either.
Looks like the industry itself is having a little PR crisis.
How absurd. I wonder who is going to be the first corporation to get nabbed for loading up a crop-duster with Brand X and taking a leisurely sight-seeing tour?
There’s a catch phrase in here somewhere:
*Without Monsanto, life itself would unpatentable…
Without drooling motherfucking morons, life itself would be impeccable…*
