Not so fast - griffin1977 and you have been dug in for a while and it hasn’t been progressing lately, but I’m not sure I’ve seen his latest objection actually addressed very well.
First, the analogy to CDs probably isn’t valid, because when you copy a CD you’re violating a copyright, not a patent. To me, they’re similar concepts, but not the same exact thing.
And canola plants certainly can self-reproduce. The usual method involves human care and feeding, but as far as I know, the techniques of care and feeding for RoundUp-Ready canola are identical to standard canola (is that the right word for the plant? How about rape? I guess canola sounds nicer, even though I think that’s the oil instead), so Monsanto wouldn’t be able to patent those techniques.
What is the status of the law concerning self-replicating inventions? As someone has mentioned, they didn’t patent the gene itself, they patented the idea of taking that gene from cauliflower and putting it into a canola plant.
My take on it is that the Constitutional mandate to grant patents is specifically meant to give an inventor royalties from his invention, in order to promote the useful arts. Allowing a farmer to intentionally get around that in the case of self-replicating inventions would, in my mind, be a violation of the words in the Constitution.
To me (and the legal system) they are very different. As shown in the example a few posts back. You can copyright the book “Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone” that stops someone else from copying your actual words. If patent law applied to novels you could patent the idea of a story of young wizards. That is a very different concept.
The reason patents promote “Science and useful Arts” is to encourage scientists to publish their discoveries (as patents must be published in the public record). In exchange for putting their ideas in the public record, the state will stop people copying those ideas without your permission, for the duration of the patent. Thats how patent law is meant to work. This only demonstrates how counter to the basic concepts of patent law these findings are.
Again (for the umpteenth time) none of these farmers looked up Monsanto’s patent copied the ideas contained in it. None of the ideas Monsanto published (via the patent office) to promote “Science and useful Arts” are being copied. Soybeans, last time I checked, do not read up at the local patent office before reproducing.
An issue I have specifically addressed no less than 4 times in this thread. And he still keeps bringing it up. How many times does this need to be addressed?
Yes that’s right. This is at least the 3rd time I have said this in this thread.
As I said in, I believe, my very first post: you can only infringe patent by deliberately and knowingly replicating the process. If you don’t take steps to replicate a process then there is no patent infringement. As such whether a patent is self-replicating or not is irrelevant because you can only be found in breach for human-directed infringement.
And as Bricker and I have said, with references to the patents themselves, that simply isn’t true. The gene itself is part of the patented.
No. If you read the court cases linked to, the view of the courts is that when a human being takes deliberate and prolonged action to produce a product that they know is patented, that deliberate and prolonged action constitutes a breach of patent.
This has been the view of the courts for 200 years. The whole self-replicating thing is a Furphy. Nobody ever has been found to have breached patent for something that self-replicated. Breaches have only ever been fund where people takes deliberate and prolonged action to cause the replication to occur.