Posted on 05/13/2013 11:00:31 AM PDT by blam
Edited on 05/13/2013 11:01:11 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto Monday over an Indiana farmer accused of having pirated the genetically-modified crops developed by the agribusiness giant.
The high court was unanimous in its decision, ruling that laws limiting patents do "not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Except the high seas were not involved, therefore there was no piracy... furthermore, the farmer clearly made a legal purchase [from the storage-facility*]... to call these 'piracy' or 'theft' is to advocate the wholesale destruction of all property-rights: in particular there could be no legitimate re-selling of 'used' items if the company prohibited it.
* -- It does not matter that the other purchasers of this seed "normally use it as feed".
Relax. We still operate in a free market. If farmer’s don’t want Monsanto seed, they can use other seed. Stealing is not a conservative value, and that is what this farmer wanted to do. Monsanto-hate is populist nonsense.
There is no conclusive proof GMO’s are harmful. There are plenty of studies showing that many of the vilified GMOs are safe. Anti-Monsanto hysteria is grounded in emotion, not science.
Thank you for your reasoned response. It worries me that anti-science, anti-capitalist sentiment is running rampant on FR. Too many people are reading and believing the hysterical Facebook posts regarding Monsanto.
This farmer knew that the seed he purchased was subject to a plant patent; that's the reason he purchased it; so he could avoid the cost of buying it legitimately.
I never thought they were unsafe. My concern is quality .
But he said hard times forced him to purchase a cheaper mixture of seeds from a grain elevator starting in 1999, which he used for his second planting.
The mixture included Roundup Ready soybeans, which Bowman was able to isolate and replant from 2000 to 2007.
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Nothing in the story tells me that the seeds he bought from the grain elevator were Monsanto product (other than the unsubstantiated allegation that it “contained” the seeds) ,, only that they had the same characteristics , they weren’t sold by Monsanto or labeled as Monsanto seeds ... they were sold as generic soybeans ... that he took the ones that survived “roundup” and grew them for future seeds/plantings sounds 100% OK to me.
Happening in most fields next to GMO fields and Monsanto demands payment for the seeds.
Virtually all soybeans raised for domestic crushing contain either the Monsanto patented trait or the Bayer patented trait. If the farmer didn't know which beans he had purchased, he wouldn't know which herbicide to apply. If he had applied the wrong herbicide, he would have killed all beans which didn't carry the patented trait.
Yup. I read recently that if we started now, using that technique, we could have a decent tasting tomato again in about 100 years.
It started with Kellogs and Post and the food pyramid, telling us that 80% of our diet should be grains (carbs).
The food pyramid has been turned upside down, we now know that our diet should only be about 10% carbs.
This was taught to us by our schools, under Jimmy Carter.
The food pyramid was a scam, and those companies made so much money, it would make Bill Gates look foolish.
My apologies if this is a duplicate post of sorts...Link to the decision here:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
“It sells the seeds subject to a licensing agreement that permits farmers to plant the purchased seed in one, and only one, growing season. Growers may consume or sell the resulting crops, but may not save any of the harvested soy-beans for replanting. Petitioner Bowman purchased Roundup Ready soybean seed for his first crop of each growing season from a company associated with Monsanto and followed the terms of the licensing agreement. But to reduce costs for his riskier late-season planting, Bowman purchased soybeans intended for consumption from a grain elevator; planted them; treated the plants with glyphosate, killing all plants without the Roundup Ready trait; harvested the resulting soybeans that contained that trait;and saved some of these harvest-ed seeds to use in his late-season planting the next season.”
There is no evidence they are harmful either
If they can't sell their seed, the farmers should be able to sue Monsanto for the value of their seed business.
If gmo seeds invade your land (the situation here), you should own them or sue them for contaminating your land with their seed.
“If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population.” ~Henry Kissenger
No there's a huge difference: plants by their nature reproduce themselves, books do not.
and, yes, the use to which the seed is put does make a difference.
Only if that use is bound (conditional) by contract... otherwise you could say that you would not sell me Diesel because I was going to use it to wash my dirty oily hands rather than burn it in my car.
This farmer knew that the seed he purchased was subject to a plant patent; that's the reason he purchased it; so he could avoid the cost of buying it legitimately.
Again, that's irrelevant -- he stole nothing, he bought the seed legally -- your view of patents would mean that someone buying a used computer that someone had not wiped with, say, a full version of PhotoShop installed is theft because it uses proprietary/patented algorithms*.
* - Algorithm patents are, by their nature, absurd -- especially with the amount of abstraction allowed in descriptions. Patenting "'f(x) = X^y + C' where y is some number and C is a constant" makes as much sense.
In truth, Monsanto developed a seed/herbicide relationship which was quantitatively superior to anything on the market at the time it was introduced. Within a matter of a couple of years, virtually all soybeans sold into the domestic market were planted with the Monsanto patented trait. Monsanto spent a boatload of time and capital developing this seed in the reasonable expectation that their intellectual property would not be seized without compensation.
By the way, the Monsanto patented trait will no more spontaneously reproduce in a neighboring field than the alphabet will spontaneously reproduce King Lear.
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