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> Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed
by AlexandrB 4y ago
> Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development?
I don't get it. Humans have selectively bred better plants for millenia before the era of modern IP. A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? This is ideology, not economics. There are plenty of institutions that would work on improving crops even if Monsanto & co. got out of the game. Universities come to mind here. And the results of their work could actually help farmers that can't afford IP-encumbered crops, not just large, wealthy farmers.
- xyzzyz 4y ago> A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? If you are fine with the process being much slower than now, why do you care about 20 years of patent protection? If you’re willing to wait centuries for improvements the modern corporations achieve in years, why not just consider the patent protection period to be extra part of the process? It’s still faster than the millennia you talk about, no?