300k Organic Farmers To Sue Monsanto For Seed Patent Claims 617
microphage writes "Monsanto went after hundreds of farmers for infringing on their patented seed after audits revealed that their farms had contained their product — as a result of routine pollination by animals and acts of nature. Unable to afford a proper defense, competing small farms have been bought out by the company in droves. As a result, Monsanto saw their profits increase by the hundreds of millions over the last few years as a result. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto tackled 144 organic farms with lawsuits and investigated roughly 500 plantations annually during that span with a so-called 'seed police.'"
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:1, Interesting)
Holy contradiciton batman
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I have no doubt that some innocent people are being caught up unfairly in the process. But I also can't blame New York for having these much-malinged "police".
As much fun as it is to bash Monsanto, if we want to change the patent regime, we must do it ourselves. Monsanto is only doing what is best for their shareholders - protecting their patents. I'm not saying that is good or bad, but not expecting them to do so is silly. Having said that, innocent farmers should obviously not fall prey to this.
Something we all should be concerned about... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's frightening that genetically-engineered crops have become so prevalent as to contaminate small-scale organic farms. The intellectual property arguments are obvious, but more concerning is the health risks. Compared with thousands of years of human agricultural co-evolution, these modifications are nowhere near as thoroughly-tested. Food crops nowadays are even modified to produce their own pesticides! There are likely very consequential side-effects lurking that will only appear generations later. Organic farmers, the ones that don't cheat, are doing us all a service by maintaining pure strains of our most important crops. Surely everyone should want to support this and protect them against contamination.
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes you can, in a limited way. You can patent genetic modifications. And that's what this is all about.
The problem here is that there's no foolproof way to prevent this variation of copyright infringement. (Monsanto is like the RIAA of the farm) And so they've bought the laws stacked heavily in their favor to make sure they can legally go after everyone they're entitled to, at a cost of being able to go after a lot of innocents as well. (one of my pet peeves, overly broad laws)
In this case the big issue is that if a farmer has a field near a Monsanto field, the wind WILL (not slim chance, not might, not maybe, WILL) cross-pollinate with some of the corn in his field. Then the goons can come in and find a kernel or two that contain DNA from their patented field, and by the law that makes you breaking the law and owing damagesa. So now the little farmer gets extorted out of his land. And that's just how the laws have been bought onto the books. It's not right, but that's the law now.
This isn't like music downloading where 95% is infringing and they're trying to hide under the "5% of it is lawful so you have to allow it" umbrella. There is a significant percentage of "unavoidable unintentional infringing" going on and companies like Monsanto abuse the law to their advantage as a result.
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
You can even patent body parts - guy found that a hospital patented an unusual genetic quirk of his while studying his blood...
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Genetically modified is just creative breeding
You are so wrong.
Regular breeding is the breeding of existing varieties of a species in the hope to achieve a better offspring
Genetic modification is done in a laboratory at microscopic level, right at the genes and often genetic traits of non-related species are put in the mix.
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
FYI second generation seeds of recent (F1 IIRC) hybrids (e.g. Trainwreck, O.G. Kush, Sour Diesel) are useless.
The children will have random mixes of the grandparents characteristics. Not an even 50/50 mix. Some will be very like one grandparent, others will have different mixes. Unpredictable and basically useless.
Older stabilized hybrids and pure breeds (e.g. Thai Haze, Hindu Kush etc) breed true.
Put simply second generation seeds are disallowed by nature in many cases. Monsanto has counted on this 'feature' sense well before genetic engineering existed.
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, the "pesticide-built-in" plants are already losing their effect on pests which are now becoming "super-pests." There was a story here on slashdot a few weeks ago I believe.
It's amazing to me that current science fails to appreciate the power of nature to overcome our tweaking and fiddling. We have been seeing this for decades with antibiotics and more recently with poisons. So before long, the "value" of Monsanto GM seed will be lost while we selectively breed super-pests which will be even harder to kill and/or manage. Will Monsanto be penalized for creating these super-pests? I doubt it.
It's not necessarily only about whether it is "safe for human consumption." There are other considerations that make GM foods like these a BAD IDEA.
Sue them for damaging private property (Score:5, Interesting)
My neighbor's dog come into my yard and damage my yard...my neighbor has to pay for restitution
Mosanto pollen come to my yard and modify/damage my plant and its output...Mosanto has to pay for restitution, No ?
Or should it that i have to pay Mosanto for the opportunity of getting my plant screwed up without asking for it ?
Logical legal and patent system please.....please
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Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the problem is when you and GP act like this is a copyright issue.
It's not, it's a patent issue -- so "first-sale doctrine" doesn't apply, "derivative works" doesn't apply. All that matters is whether you have implemented the invention covered by the patent and it's possible to do so even if you've never had access to a licensed implementation.
Is there a more mainstream news source for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was mentioned earlier RT seems a bit fringe. Certainly a class action of this size would be on some mainstream news sites, but some sniffing on google turns up other small sites quoting RT.
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh blow it out yer' hole. The day the Monsanto blows up in a fiery ball is the day I'll happily dance on their graves. That's not a threat, but I think they are one of the most dangerous companies on the planet.
The facts that I've seen so far, claim that Monsanto GM crops are worse in the long term - they require more herbicide than normal crops long term, and they are more expensive. Also, these herbicide crops are cross-polinating with road-side weeds and transferring the Roundup resistance to wild species. The farmers they sell seed to are not being trained to properly plant, rotate and rest fields. All in all I think it will be the biggest disaster in agricultural history.
I'm NOT against GMO foods - I think that genetics can do wonderful things for humanity. I just think that the work Monsanto has done so far is terrible.
The truth is that instead of creating nutritional, high quality and resistant foods, Monsanto concentrated on profit and pesticide sales. Companies shouldn't win when the product is crap - and that's all I see in Monsanto GM foods.
Legal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Forget the whole GMO debate, but how is it even possible that a multi-billion dollar company can threaten to sue a small farmer and then force them to sell out to them when the farmer cannot mount a proper defense. Couldn't you just create a well funded company that would identify small farms and threaten to sue them for anything, forcing them to sell out to you for lower that fair market prices as a part of a settlement? How does that not fall under some Organized Crime law?
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:5, Interesting)
The scary thing is that the scientific studies that are peer reviewed about gmo's is shockingly close to zero.
Some of the gmo's are possibly a lot better for you and some are possibly as bad as the grand parent post claims, and the industry doesn't seem to want to know, which leads to some uncomfortable thoughts about the safety of our food supply and monocrops that are enabled by gmo's.
Did you know that if a five digit PLU code starts with the number 8 it is GMO, but nobody uses that code, the idea was that maybe GMO foods would be higher in vitamins or have some other positive value and be worth more to consumers. The reality is that food industry believes that if it was easy to tell if food was GMO it would not sell except at very steep discount. Sort of like Chinese peppers are about 1/5 the price of peppers grown in Chile in the San Francisco area (at least at the stores I shop at.)
The food industry's behavior around GMO food is similar enough to how the tobacco industry behaved that people are very suspicious of GMO foods.
If the food industry was willing to have clear labels on all GMO food maybe there would be some studies that would allow us to say what GMO food is and isn't fit for human consumption. Some of it is probably fine, some of it probably not so.
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:4, Interesting)
It's amazing to me that current science fails to appreciate the power of nature to overcome our tweaking and fiddling. We have been seeing this for decades with antibiotics and more recently with poisons. So before long, the "value" of Monsanto GM seed will be lost while we selectively breed super-pests which will be even harder to kill and/or manage. Will Monsanto be penalized for creating these super-pests? I doubt it.
It's not about current science failing to appreciate the power of nature. Instead it's all about profit (ie. money). Even a temporary short-term advantage means more profit for however long it lasts and that's all companies care about, long term consequences be damned. In fact, by creating super-pests they're queuing up more problems to solve in the future for profit.
Monsanto's Dirty Tricks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I hate to defend Monsanto somewhat, but (Score:0, Interesting)
Regular breeding is the breeding of existing varieties of a species in the hope to achieve a better offspring
You are so wrong.
Regular breeding, of the sort done from the 1950s onwards (which gave us the Green Revolution), involves exposing existing varieties to chemical mutagens and radiation. Most of the resulting mutants are useless, but a few have useful qualities, which are bred back into the main line.
By comparison, genetic engineering is safe and controlled: you know exactly what gene you're introducing, rather than inducing millions of random changes and hoping for the best.
Re:Sue them for damaging private property (Score:5, Interesting)
My neighbor's dog come into my yard and damage my yard...my neighbor has to pay for restitution
Except Monsanto didn't plant it or own the original seed, a neighboring farmer did. If your neighbor's dog digs up your yard, the dog's owner is liable, not the pet store where he bought it.
Except from Monsanto's perspective the neighboring farmer doesn't own the seed -- he just licenses it.
Say we modify the analogy a little -- assume the neighbor's dog is attacking someone in your yard.
If the pet store knows the dog has a history of attacking people and rents the dog to your neighbor without telling him of the dog's history, who should be liable when the dog attacks someone?
Re:Take this with a grain of salt (Score:4, Interesting)
Get real, it is simply a Russian for profit multilingual tabloid, without ties to major US corporations, hence has no qualms about sticking it to US corporations. Of course they do tread lightly in Russian politics.
Off uniquely Russian political stance, you either sought power through wealth or through politics but not through both, to do both invites a more aggressive permanent solution to your excessive ego. In the interim http://rt.com/business/news/russia-privatization-1990-legitimacy-915/ [rt.com].
So is RT better or worse than US mass media, truth is, it is far better and nothing to do with politics, simply lacking ties to many multinational corporations it can stick it too them. I expect it will eventually be bought out and tow the psychopath corporate line.