Cite?
That’s like saying “Patent law applies to inventions, not light bulbs.”. Only, without all the CAPS.
No, this is not what farming boils down to. Farming is an industry that converts the growth of plants into a viable product. This is like saying the lumber industry boils down to letting trees grow.
What these farmers were doing was converting their plants into a seed product, by using specific techniques designed to make a seed product. It is still legal to make seed, you just can’t make seed from plants that are patented, the same way it’s legal to photocopy things, but you can’t photocopy things that are copyrighted.
Light bulbs ARE inventions. Plants are not.
Wow.
Every legal expert in the world disagrees with your approach to patent law.
Again you are confusing copyright and patent law. They are very different things.
JK Rowling can stop me photocopying Harry Potter, she can’t claim rights to any novel involving a boy wizard.
No, plants and animals are explicitly NOT patentable inventions.
Why do you suppose that every court case to have addressed the issue has disagreed with you?
Isn’t it the court’s job to decide what the law’s intent is, and not yours?
What training or experience do you have in interpreting law?
Really?
Monsanto Co. v. Scruggs, 459 F.3d 1328 (Fed.Cir.2006): “Scruggs argued that: neither Monsanto’s biotechnology (Roundup Ready (R) soybeans and Bollgard/Roundup Ready (R) cotton) nor the plants in Scruggs’ fields were covered by the patents . . . [but the court finds] the Roundup Ready (R) plants are covered by the '605 patent.”
How about Monsanto Co. v. David, 448 F.Supp.2d 1088 (E.D.Mo.2006) (All Roundup Ready® soybeans contain the chimeric gene described in claims 1 and 2 of the '605 patent)
And Monsanto Co. v. Good, 2004 WL 1664013 (D.N.J.2003) (construes claims 1, 2, 4 and 5 of the '605 patent to cover Roundup Ready® soybeans);
Then there’s Monsanto Co. v. Trantham, 156 F.Supp.2d 855 (W.D.Tenn.2001) (Roundup Ready® soybeans covered by the '605 patent and infringed).
That’s a bunch of cases that all say the patent law does in fact cover those plants.
Holy GM cow- this is one of those threads that unfortunately have become so rare lately.
I am one of the daily lurkers here, and very rarely post. This is one of those threads where, much like The Tao’s Revenge, I came in being totally anti Monsanto. And like in a few threads over the years, I come out educated about the actual facts, biological and legal. And all of that from the patience of a few posters with the knowledge to actually turn my position around.
Blake, Bricker, I have no idea whether we may agree on other issues, but for your time in this thread, I thank you . Sincerely.
Thank you.
I have to live in the society created by those laws. There is nothing to say legal decisions cannot be asinine, nonsensical, and plain wrong. Do you think only people with law degrees should be able to discuss the laws that govern them? I’m sure most people on the street would agree with me on this, if they could have it explained to them.
Again, patent laws are designed to protect inventions. Lets use your example above. Samuel Hopkins invented a mechanical process for making potash. In order to violate that patent you would need to steal that idea and use it to make potash without paying Mr Hopkins. Potash does not make itself, if you brought potash from Mr Hopkins it does not spontaneously produce more potash. To make more you would have to use Mr Hopkin’s idea. This is how patents have worked since then, they protect peoples ideas from others stealing them. Its not a perfect system but most people would I’m sure agree with the basic concept.
Now however, thanks to an obscure 5-4 decision (relating to an oil-cleaning bacteria) which was not widely discussed or approved of by the population as whole. This idea was extended to include the idea that you violating someones patent not by stealing their idea, but simply allowing natural organisms (that happen to contain a certain gene) to reproduce.
As a result of this people who have absolutely no interest in stealing Monsanto’s techniques for gene splicing can be dragged into court for simply letting plants reproduce. That is insane and, again, I’m sure most people on the street would agree with me on this.
They have then stretched that already ridiculous idea so a decision against people designing and manufacturing needles in a way to specifically get round someones patent, so that someone can dragged into court for JUST CLEANING SEED.
Let me see have I got this straight here, because I can’t believe what I’m reading here.
You are disagreeing with his statement that a lightbulb is an invention and a plant is not, and that “every legal expert in the world” disagrees with his statement?
If you were doing an IQ test, this is like the very beginning of a two-hour test that covers a very wide range of IQs, and you were asked the following question:
"Please circle the inventions out of the following list: plants, animals, toasters, kettles, people, bottles, light bulbs, liquids. "
…that you would have a problem with him circling light bulbs and not circling plants?
Exactly. Try passing this test out on the street and see how many people include “plants, animals, and people”. Then good luck explaining to the majority of people who didn’t include those items why (thanks to an obscure legal decision none of them have probably heard of) the US legal system thinks they are wrong.
Someone has a very warped view of what is an is not an invention. And I’d argue its **not **the US people.
Did you explain to these “people on the street” that the specific plant you’re talking about includes a gene that was invented by some scientists?
Except that you haven’t found too many folks who were dragged into court “simply” for letting plants reproduce. The folks that Monsanto drags into court are ones that bought seed from Monsanto and agreed not to replant it, but then did so anyway, so Monsanto is suing them for breaking their agreement.
The folks may have had no interest in stealing Monsanto’s gene splicing, but they did have an interest in stealing Monsanto’s Round-up-immune plant.
What right have they to a plant that’s immune to Round-up? That plant didn’t exist in the world before Monsanto made it. That’s what they want to steal.
But again, the people are not just cleaning seed. Monsanto has told them they are helping farmers violate Monsanto’s patent, and they keep doing it. So they’re not “just cleaning seed.” They are aiding someone else in stealing plant seeds that will grow into plants that are immune to Round-Up.
Hmm.
How about if the list says:
ordinary plants, toasters, kettles, plants with an engineered gene that makes them immune to herbicide, light bulbs, and bottles?
What would ordinary people pick then?
Did Percy Schmeiser sign an agreement? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought he took the plants that volunteered up on the edges of his fields, and selected them for RoundUp resistance. He knowingly stole the products of their patent, but I didn’t think that he signed anything with Monsanto.
That plant was not made by Monsanto, or with Monsanto’s inventions. It was made by plant reproduction. The fact there are some genes from a virus in there does not change that fact. No ideas were stolen by those farmers. Applying patent law in this case is completely nonsensical.
But patent law is about protecting IDEAS not plants. If Monsanto wants it to be illegal to allow someone to let their plants reproduce they should lobby the government to make that illegal, not try and shoehorn that into patent law.
This is not (despite you attempts to make spurious analogies) a copyright issue, you cannot copyright genes (thankfully).
I don’t doubt Monsanto put alot of time and energy creating innovative ways to genetically engineer plants. Those techniques should be protected by patent law. No one is stealing those techniques. They are not “stealing” anything. They are just letting plants reproduce. Its nonsensical to say by doing so they are stealing an idea.
It would make it more reasonable for them to pick that a human invented it, but it’s still far from true. Plants and genes came about from billions of years of evolution, they’re not something Monsanto invented.
If I wrote a bit of software or did a bit of tweaking to the hardware of this computer, could I then claim I “invented” the computer? Of course not.
Maybe a type of copyright status could be afforded to Monsanto for the specific DNA structure they’ve created, but it should be up to them to contain it… and they should use the terminator gene for it!!! I think that would be highly agreeable and the best possible thing we could hope for… not Monsanto infecting crops with their genes and suing them for it.
We settled the Scmeisser issue to pages back. We are discussing somehtingelse now.
WRT to Schmeisser what appears to have happened is that Schmeiser was given some GM seeds by a friend an act that was itself against the contract that his freind signed. He then planted those seeds throughout his field in order to get them to cross-pollinated his non-GM crop.
The following year Schmeiser collected seeds from that field and replanted them. He then sprayed the entire crop with Glyphosate herbicide. According to the farm -hand working for him he did this at least 3 times.
He then collected seed from the plants that survived being sprayed with herbicide and the following year he replanted them, and also sprayed the resulting plants with Glyphosate on multiple occasions. At the end of that year he has a nearly pure-strain GM crop.
That process of spraying the crops with Glyphosate to select for the GM resistant pants is part of Monsanto’s patent. You can not do that any more than apply any other process that is protected by a patent. Schmeiser did do it, and he did it deliberately and repeatedly.
The actual patent is of course, public record, and you can read it for yourself. An integral part of the patent is the process of testing for Glyphosate resistance through application of varying concentrations of Glyphosate to seedlings. This is exactly what Schmeiser did, repeatedly, and every court in the land found that it was was a very clear and deliberate breach of the patent.
Not surprisingly every court in the land found him guilty of breaching Monsanto’s patent and stealing their intellectual property.
In no possible sense did Scmeisser "just let plants reproduce. He painstakingly prevented prevented the majority of plants from reproducing, while putting equal effort into facilitating the reproduction of some. That process of unnatural reproductive selection for a specific gene that does not occur in nature is covered by patent.
As it should be.
Consider a short poem that is copyrighted. Something like “Happy Birthday”.
It would child’s play to write some computer code that selects random English words and assembles them into lines that rhyme. A decent mid -range 2011 PC could spew out a few million of these every day. By random chance, every year I would probably produce a few hundred copies of “Happy Birthday” using this method.
I could then write more code to find those in amongst all the noise, and move them to a special file.
So, does it seem reasonable that I should then be able to sell those copies of “Happy Birthday” as my own work? Free from intellectual property laws? Schmeiser and griffin1977 woudl argue that I should.
After all, they just occurred naturally. I mean, sure, both the process and the environment in which they reproduced was entirely artificial and the product of human technology. But that is equally true sowing cleaned seeds into a tilled field.
And sure, I put a lot of effort into producing the conditions under which they would be produced. But that is equally true of fertilising, irrigating and weeding a crop field.
Sure, I took pains to remove every resulting product that didn’t exactly match the protected work. And sure I deliberately did this with the intention of reproducing a work that I knew was protected. But that is equally true of Schmeisser poisoning all the non-resistant plants in his field.
And sure I did all this with the intention of producing a protected work that I could sell for profit. But that is why Schmeisser did it too.
So does anybody believe that such a deliberate attempt at an end-run around intellectual property laws should be allowed because it is “natural”?