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75-year-old soybean farmer sees Monsanto lawsuit reach U.S. Supreme Court

272 points by mehrshad 14y ago

dangrossman 14y ago
IANAL: Why isn't patent exhaustion a solid defense to Monsanto's suits? The anti-GMO documentaries I've seen have covered the "their seed blew into my field" and "I bought seed and signed a contract to only sew it one season then breached it" type lawsuits, but not this -- He's buying seed, from a third party, without signing any agreement with Monsanto. That seed isn't even necessarily Monsanto's product, but from plants that descended from those seeds. It may contain the patented genes, but those genes only got there from the original authorized sale of seed to whoever owned the elevator. The exhaustion doctrine says that a patent holder's rights end at the point of an authorized sale. Once Apple sells you an iPad, you can do whatever you want with that iPad, including selling it to someone else, and aren't infringing the underlying patents the product implements. So, why can Monsanto claim damages here?
- eurleif 14y ago
  IANAL either, but perhaps the seeds being descendants of authorized seeds, rather than authorized seeds, is the problem? It would be sort of like duplicating your authorized iPad with a 3D printer.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - largesse 14y ago
    I'm wondering whether a good defense would be that with natural gene mutation, these seeds aren't the ones under patent.
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    Even if you had an amazing 3D printer that could produce iPads, that doesn't mean you can sell it. You bought Microsoft Office, can you just duplicate it and sell it to your coworkers? I'm sure your software "duplicator" can produce exact copies. IANAL either, but I'm pretty sure your argument wouldn't stand up in court if you tried to sell your exact copies of your authorized copy of Microsoft Office.
    - dchest 14y ago
      You're confusing copyright law with patent law.
- jrkelly 14y ago
  The argument is (partially) that you can't plant your iPad and have it grow into 1 million new iPads that you then sell to undercut Apple. Monsanto is arguing that the law needs to be considered specifically (differently?) for the case of self-replicating technologies since if the patent exhausts after 1 generation then the next year a customer could come on the market with millions of copies of their product. Software / book publishing business models dealt with this same issue via copyright that kept customers from reselling millions of copies of their product after buying it. Copyright doesn't apply to genetic code though.
  - draggnar 14y ago
    Copyright doesn't apply to genetic code though. Is this the fundamental question they will be arguing at the supreme court?
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  He's buying seed, from a third party, without signing any agreement with Monsanto. That seed isn't even necessarily Monsanto's product, but from plants that descended from those seeds. It may contain the patented genes, but those genes only got there from the original authorized sale of seed to whoever owned the elevator. Devil's advocate: even if you buy your DVD at Amazon you still cannot show it for $2 each to 50 people at your home or make copies for profit. Maybe the sack containing the seed had some sort of disclaimer "by opening and using this you agree to..."
  - largesse 14y ago
    Re Devil's Advocate: that's a copyright rather than patent.
  - pedrocr 14y ago
    Devil's advocate: even if you buy your DVD at Amazon you still cannot show it for $2 each to 50 people at your home or make copies for profit. Is that actually the case? Last time I sawy anything about this the publishers were trying to have it both ways, saying that on the one hand what you owned wasn't the disk it was a license to the content so you couldn't just do whatever you wanted with it, but if you tried to use that to say "well then I can rip the DVD and copy it somewhere else" you'd get an argument about only owning that specific format.
    - DrJokepu 14y ago
      Yes it is. You need a license for public performances of copyrighted works; in America this is governed by Title 17 of the United States Code.
- cake93 14y ago
  The third party (reseller) who bought the seed from Monsanto in the first place most probably breached the contract by producing and selling new seeds! This third party is probably the one who is to be sued, but patent law allows the farmer to be sued as well..
  - Retric 14y ago
    The can also only be sued once, where the farmer and everyone after that point could continue to resell dwecendents of that line.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
rtpg 14y ago
> Monsanto says that if it allowed Bowman to keep replanting his seeds it would undermine its business model, endangering the expensive research that it uses to produce advanced agricultural products. I didn't realize that having a bad business model gave you a valid case.
- bjelkeman-again 14y ago
  But our politicians have decided otherwise and allows for patents even on DNA sequences that weren't even constructed but merely discovered.
  - El_Mariachi 14y ago
    Those patents are on identifying, isolating, and extracting those sequences. Making a new copy of them in your body (or in the case of soybeans, growing the plant, which obviously involves DNA replication) isn't infringing, but doing anything else useful with them is.
- latch 14y ago
  Devil's advocate: How do you suggest companies with large R&D budgets doing work that can potentially benefit humanity recoupe its costs. The question applies to GMOs where the product can often reproduce as well as medical companies where generics are involved.
  - rwallace 14y ago
    How do you suggest we finance lighthouses without arresting people and putting them in prison for the crime of walking down a road that happens to be in line of sight of a lighthouse while not wearing a company-approved blindfold? As a libertarian I think we should seek a smaller role for government in people's lives. But I also think if something is in fact a function of government, we would be better off to admit it and formally finance it as such, than bring it in the back door by dishonest means.
    - deleted 14y ago
dragonbonheur 14y ago
Q: What does it take to make a multi-million company and its over-qualified employees forget that the purpose of life is to SPREAD? A: GREED.
DigitalSea 14y ago
Don't get me started on the evil company that is Monsanto. For those of you who aren't aware of the history of this company I strongly suggest you do some reading if you have the time. We're talking about a company more aggressive and protective of its patents than Apple or any tech company anyone has ever seen before. History has proven that the courts aren't exactly all too good at delivering fair, unbiased and swift justice when it comes to a Monsanto vs (insert rural farmer here) cases. I hope Bowman wins this case, it'll hopefully set a precedent and example that Monsanto can't walk over family farmers trying to make an honest living. Most of the prior cases Monsanto has brought against farmers usually end up being settled because the defendant runs out of money to keep fighting and ends up losing everything they own. It's companies like Monsanto that are ruining family farming. If this continues farming as we know it will cease to exist in the traditional sense as we all know it and eventually the only farms that will exist will be corporately owned ones.
- dhathorn 14y ago
  Why is family farming worth protecting? What extra value do family farms provide to me, the person actually buying food? People lose their jobs because superior companies out-compete them all the time. Why should farmers be protected from this?
  - Panoramix 14y ago
    Food is essential for society and it strikes me as a very bad idea to leave it all in the hands of a selfish mega corporation with an exceptionally poor track record.
    - refurb 14y ago
      Medicine is essential for society as well. Would you like to take it out of the hands of the mega corporations as well? Who exactly would be making the new drugs? And don't say the gov't. They gov't's track record of producing new drugs is negligible. Gov't funding contributing to new drugs? Yes, of course. But gov't funding playing a major role in putting a new drug in a patient? Minimal.
El_Mariachi 14y ago
You don't patent things, you patent methods. Monsanto has patented a method of inserting and manipulating certain gene sequences in soybeans. Growing offspring of existing modified beans is not the same as performing the modification. If they wanted their seeds to have an expiration date they should have engineered that in there too. Soybean replicants.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > You don't patent things, you patent methods. That may be true now. There was a time, not so long ago, that a patent was denied to any idea that had not been reduced to practice, in a working physical embodiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice Quote: "In United States patent law, the reduction to practice is a concept meaning the embodiment of the concept of an invention. The date of this embodiment is critical to the determination of priority between inventors in an interference proceeding." (I hasten to add that the above rule about priority no longer applies. Because of recent changes, the U.S. is changing to a first-to-file system.) Quote: "A 'working model' is usually a strong evidence to demonstrate actual reduction to practice. Unlike patent models of the 18th and 19th century, a working model is no longer a requirement of the U.S. patent law." All this has been swept away by changes in the law, and we have the present patent system in which the patent office rubber-stamps virtually anything, and claimants work things out in court.
- jrkelly 14y ago
  You can patent things other than methods. For example, If you invent a novel chemical you can patent it - that's the basis of the pharma industry business model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter
cduan 14y ago
So here's what I gather, after having read the lower court opinion and several of the briefs. Monsanto owns a patent on certain soybean seeds. They sell 1G seeds to farmers, allowing the farmers to grow them into 2G seeds. The farmers are not licensed to plant the 2G seeds. Bowman bought some 2G seeds and planted them, and Monsanto sued. Bowman says that the planting of 2G seeds is permitted under the doctrine of "patent exhaustion." According to that doctrine, if a patented physical object is sold under proper license, then a patent lawsuit involving that same physical object is not permitted, even if the object is sold to someone else. The lower court said that patent exhaustion doesn't apply to the 2G seeds, because Monsanto only granted a license on the 1G seeds. The 1G seeds are not the same physical object as the 2G seeds. At first I thought this was a simple case, but Bowman is making a very interesting argument in the Supreme Court. It is based on an old case called Quanta. In Quanta, the patent was directed to a certain computer process, and the patent owner sold computer chips with circuitry for performing that process. The chips themselves were useless, of course, but they just needed to be combined with some standard hardware and turned on to work. Did this mean that, by adding the extra hardware, a new physical object had been made that could be the subject of a lawsuit? The Supreme Court said no: because the chips "embodied" the patented invention and only required standard hardware to be added, the chips invoked patent exhaustion, so lawsuits based on their further use were barred. Bowman's argument: the 1G seeds "embody" the invention (by having the DNA and biological machinery to produce 2G seeds), and only "standard hardware" (soil, watering, etc.) needs to be added to get the working invention (the 2G seeds), so therefore the 2G seeds fall under patent exhaustion. The main counterargument is that in Quanta, the original computer chips were still present and intact, whereas the 2G seeds do not include the 1G seeds intact. This requires a narrower interpretation of Quanta, and I could see the Supreme Court going with either this narrower reading or Bowman's broader one. (For fun, you can try to come up with hypothetical cases that are in between: what if the patentee in Quanta had sold semiconductor masks for making chips?)
- belorn 14y ago
  Do an product need to be intact to count? If this is the core of Monsanto argument, then it sounds to me as completely rubbish and something a court should have no problems throwing out. Lets say I bought a new mousetrap. After purchase, I go around and add/remove aspect of it. I change the color scheme. I change the cheese to a more smelly version. Has it now suddenly become a new mousetrap and is thus no longer the same physical object as first sold? If the seed still embodies the details described in the patent, how is it not still the same object? I could understand Monsanto counterargument if no aspect of 1G seed existed in the 2G seed but thats of course not true. More likely, all patented aspect of 1G seed is all still in 2G seed. If that was not true, than even if Monsanto won, they would loose as they then would have no claim on 2G. Thus the only changes of 1G -> 2G must be trivial and not covered by the patent.
pingou 14y ago
I hate Monsanto as much as everyone else but I agree with them in this case. If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ? I believe GM are a chance to humanity, with the potential to feed more and more people. But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ? And as far as I know, these seeds allow farmers to use massive doses of roundup, if this guy used some roundup on his crops it's fair to say he perfectly knows these were gm seeds and that he wasn't allowed to use it for free. If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it and do like farmers always did, with standard seeds.
- fla 14y ago
  > But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ? A very bad business model indeed.
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    Wouldn't that apply to software & video media as well? AMC sells me a movie, then I copy it and send it to all my friends with no loss in quality for free. Companies then spend tons of money inventing DRM and copy protection techniques. Should Monsanto produce a modified seed that produces seedless fruit? Of course this wouldn't work for products where the seed is the consumable end result (soybean, corn). It seems like Monsanto's business model is no better than our's (software) when one can copy the product easily and distribute it. The only difference is that there are very few seed manufacturers so Monsanto stands alone at trial. Suppose in the future when seed genetic programmers are as common as indie software shops, should these genetic programmers have similar IP protections that software people take for granted?
    - fla 14y ago
      I don't know. My personal feeling is all this patent stuff sounds horribly wrong, be it software or living organisms.
    - agilord 14y ago
meric 14y ago
If Monsanto patent a method of genetically modifying my child's genes (so that he is more resistant to cancer, for example), does that mean my child cannot have children without paying a license fee to Monsanto, otherwise he/she is liable for patent infringement?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  If Monsato patents a virus, and it spreads out of control, can those affected, whose bodies produce more of the virus, be sued for patent infringement?
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    Yes, but they didn't. Your straw-man argument is pretty inaccurate here. The lawsuit isn't about the accidental cross pollination of genes. It's probably closer to duplicating copyright works by someone who bought one copy.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  It depends if they made your child pesticide-resistant or not
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  It depends if they made your child pesticide-resistant or not
- bane 14y ago
  bingo, you've just described every genegenering company's wet dream, patent licenses fees in perpetuity, that also exponentially increase with each generation
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
To me this raises interesting questions of wider infrastructure regulation. The supply of gas to homes is heavily regulated in every country - but regulations over who owns a seed? No one ever thought such a thing possible. The same goes for Internet search - if Google goes broke or looses its backups or charges 1 pound a month subscription what happens? Do we need a law of innovation-to-infrastructure? Once a company achieves some innovation that is sooooo part of the world that it seems like infrastructure, do we prevent it from monetizing the same in some counter productive manner? Do we produce a oversight committee I squirm inwardly at half those words - but then again my gas supply works, at a affordable rate.
- jessaustin 14y ago
  Does the gas company do a great deal of R&D? Sure there's R&D involved in extraction and refining, but you seem to be talking about distribution. I think you may be talking about the (incorrect) idea that large infrastructure assets must be protected by state-enforced monopoly. Large infrastructure assets do not need this protection, and I blame Ma Bell for popularizing the idea (at least in the USA) that they do. There's actually a huge natural gas rollout taking place in my community right now: http://www.summitnaturalgas.com/view/92 http://www.summitnaturalgas.com/view/92 This is a large investment, which involves laying hundreds of miles of pipe and boring under the Lake of the Ozarks in three different places (in one location parallel to a privately-funded highway bridge). I understand that investors expect to be paid back over decades. Yet, no one appointed Summit to do this work, any more than anyone appointed Google or Monsanto to do what they do. Anyone in the world with an internet connection and a server farm is free to compete with Google. On day one when they turn the tap on their pipeline, Summit will be competing with numerous propane suppliers, the local incumbent electric companies, and even the long-term possibility (however remote) of another group building another natural gas pipeline. If Summit and Google don't need state protection, why would Monsanto?
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    I am not saying state protection - more like state-encouraged-socially-beneficial-behaviour Tomorrow will change so fast that relying on 75 year old farmers to take on esoteric legal points to enforce social benefit is a little unreliable
newsmaster 14y ago
Funny I just watched a documentary a few days ago about Monsanto and how some GM crops strip the lining and the gut causing a myriad of health problems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnlTYFKBg18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnlTYFKBg18 Not sure how much of it is fact though.
tarr11 14y ago
This guy needs a kickstarter campaign. He can send us some 2G soybeans from his farm if he wins the case and we can all plant them in our gardens.
coin 14y ago
Unrelated, but their mobile version of the page is utterly unusable on my iPad 1. Wished they just served up the non-mobile version.
mattmcknight 14y ago
Why this link from "rawstory" instead of the guardian? http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/09/soybean-farmer-monsanto-supreme-court http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/09/soybean-farmer-mon...
anuy 14y ago
http://www.globalresearch.ca/killer-seeds-the-devastating-impacts-of-monsanto-s-genetically-modified-seeds-in-india/28629 http://www.globalresearch.ca/killer-seeds-the-devastating-im... Killer Seeds The irony is GM seeds have not been effective in India and the consequences are not as rosy as what Monsanto had promised to deliver. Scathing reports of mass suicides of Indian farmers broke out as recently as three years ago when scores of farmers took their own lives in order to escape the burden of high prices and failure of Monsanto’s GM seeds. Monsanto offered its GM seeds to the farmers of India with hopes of reaping plentiful crops. Plain and mostly uneducated farmers thought Monsanto had come to provide a “magic” formula that would transform their lives. They had no idea what was coming. Monsanto’s seeds in India did not produce what the company had promised and farmers hoped. The expensive seeds piled up debts and destroyed farming fields. In many instances, the crops simply failed to materialize. The farmers were not aware that the GM seeds required more water than the traditional seeds. And lack of rain in many parts of India exacerbated the crop failure.
coditor 14y ago
The argument not being made here is this: why should you be able to patent DNA sequences? Sure Monsanto is patenting the method to create the sequences, but enforcing the end result of the method (seeds) doesn't make any sense as a patent. It's like patenting a machine that makes widgets, then suing people who don't use the widgets the way you'd like them to.
Qantourisc 14y ago
What happens when a bag falls of the transport, and grows a patch ? Next the seeds drop and make a bigger patch. Who needs to pay the patent fees mother nature ? Another scenario: cross-breeding with other crops due to bees. Your strain could get copied to the field next door: NEW problem. And for all the evil corporations out there: make as many seeds as you can. Next put them in an airplain and spread them EVERYWHERE you can. Wait 3 yeas for the strain to spread and sew EVERYONE. In essence you a selling a self-replicating machine not under your control ... And they don't see an issue here ? A better way to "reward" these companies (if we want genetic mutated strains) let them prove the worth they create and pay it off by the government, since they serve the entire community. (And hope there is no corruption or abuse on the system.)
nlh 14y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot since I first read about it yesterday. Here's what I think is _fair_ (throwing out doctrine, etc.). IA(definitely)NAL. Monsanto has every right to get a patent on the 1G seeds. They have every right to sell those seeds -- they put money and effort into designing a (theoretically) improved product and should be rewarded for their investment. Once they sell the 1G seeds, however, that's it. If the resulting plants produce equal-quality 2G seeds, then so be it. Once the farmer has purchased the 1G seeds (presumably from Monsanto), that's the end of the road for Monsanto. They've produced a product, sold it, and made their money. What's happening here is that Monsanto is using the courts to compensate for a bad business model and a flaw in their design. If they want to continue to get farmers to purchase seeds from them year after year, then what they should have done is engineered the seeds to "expire" after a generation: The results plants should produce 2G seeds that are in some way inferior to the 1G seeds. That way, farmers have a natural incentive to keep purchasing 1G seeds year after year. No lawsuits or restrictive license agreements needed. If farmers want the best, they buy from Monsanto. If they are ok with the inferior 2G seeds, then they can harvest their own and keep planting. If it's not possible for Monsanto to engineer the seeds as such, well, too bad. The buck stops there. They need to charge more for the 1G seeds then. But farmers won't pay if the cost is too high? Well, again, too bad. Their job is to convince farmers that buying 1G seeds at 2-3x the price is worth it because of the improved product. If not, well, back to the drawing board. This comes down to Monsanto trying to use a license agreement and the courts to compensate for a flaw in their product design, and that isn't right.
- crusso 14y ago
  I agree. Further, if Monsanto wants to reap the benefit of their product's self-reproduction; they should be required to pay cleanup costs (by the EPA? Department of Agriculture?) to remove "contaminated" soybeans from the rest of the environment. It's not this farmer's fault that Monsanto's product has polluted the stock of available leftover soybeans. Monsanto should be the entity on the hook here, not the farmer.
- sshumaker 14y ago
  They do own technology to achieve this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology#section_3 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techn... It basically prevents G2 seeds altogether, but they've pledged not to use it because of public outcry, instead relying on these contracts. If you seriously think through the consequences of usage of this kind of tech, it's pretty dire. Due to natural cross-pollination, we could be setting ourselves up for a world where everyone must buy all of their seeds from Monsanto and their ilk, who would have a monopoly on the world's food supply. That's bad news indeed.
falcolas 14y ago
To me, the following is the worst part of this entire story: "... it is ironically Bowman’s own lack of cash that has seen the case end up at the supreme court." Why does it take someone being bankrupt and having "nothing to loose" to get a case like this brought forward? It seems like a perversion of the concept of the court systems.
- lilsunnybee 14y ago
  Seems like the best part to me. Usually unless you're well-off or wealthy, justice is hard to come by. In this case its the argument that matters, not the weight of wealth behind it.
rfugger 14y ago
The Supreme Court of Canada heard a similar case 9 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmei... (Spoiler alert: Monsanto won.)
shill 14y ago
My question is, will Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from a case involving his former employer?
kostko 14y ago
Oh god. Can we just stop following the law in something so obvious? What's fair and normal for 10000000 of years, has recently been changed by some writings on a paper. And don't give me the 'you let this slip but where do you draw the line next time'. Humanity has become so obsessed with these rules, guidelines, standards, that we've imprisoned ourselves for the sake of a few bucks. In the end, there will be just one factory with a big tomato logo on it, from which all the worlds tomatoes will come.

272 points by mehrshad 14y ago

IANAL: Why isn't patent exhaustion a solid defense to Monsanto's suits? The anti-GMO documentaries I've seen have covered the "their seed blew into my field" and "I bought seed and signed a contract to only sew it one season then breached it" type lawsuits, but not this -- He's buying seed, from a third party, without signing any agreement with Monsanto. That seed isn't even necessarily Monsanto's product, but from plants that descended from those seeds. It may contain the patented genes, but those genes only got there from the original authorized sale of seed to whoever owned the elevator. The exhaustion doctrine says that a patent holder's rights end at the point of an authorized sale. Once Apple sells you an iPad, you can do whatever you want with that iPad, including selling it to someone else, and aren't infringing the underlying patents the product implements. So, why can Monsanto claim damages here?

eurleif 14y ago
IANAL either, but perhaps the seeds being descendants of authorized seeds, rather than authorized seeds, is the problem? It would be sort of like duplicating your authorized iPad with a 3D printer.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- largesse 14y ago
  I'm wondering whether a good defense would be that with natural gene mutation, these seeds aren't the ones under patent.
- veemjeem 14y ago
  Even if you had an amazing 3D printer that could produce iPads, that doesn't mean you can sell it. You bought Microsoft Office, can you just duplicate it and sell it to your coworkers? I'm sure your software "duplicator" can produce exact copies. IANAL either, but I'm pretty sure your argument wouldn't stand up in court if you tried to sell your exact copies of your authorized copy of Microsoft Office.
  - dchest 14y ago
    You're confusing copyright law with patent law.
jrkelly 14y ago
The argument is (partially) that you can't plant your iPad and have it grow into 1 million new iPads that you then sell to undercut Apple. Monsanto is arguing that the law needs to be considered specifically (differently?) for the case of self-replicating technologies since if the patent exhausts after 1 generation then the next year a customer could come on the market with millions of copies of their product. Software / book publishing business models dealt with this same issue via copyright that kept customers from reselling millions of copies of their product after buying it. Copyright doesn't apply to genetic code though.
- draggnar 14y ago
  Copyright doesn't apply to genetic code though. Is this the fundamental question they will be arguing at the supreme court?
OGinparadise 14y ago
He's buying seed, from a third party, without signing any agreement with Monsanto. That seed isn't even necessarily Monsanto's product, but from plants that descended from those seeds. It may contain the patented genes, but those genes only got there from the original authorized sale of seed to whoever owned the elevator. Devil's advocate: even if you buy your DVD at Amazon you still cannot show it for $2 each to 50 people at your home or make copies for profit. Maybe the sack containing the seed had some sort of disclaimer "by opening and using this you agree to..."
- largesse 14y ago
  Re Devil's Advocate: that's a copyright rather than patent.
- pedrocr 14y ago
  Devil's advocate: even if you buy your DVD at Amazon you still cannot show it for $2 each to 50 people at your home or make copies for profit. Is that actually the case? Last time I sawy anything about this the publishers were trying to have it both ways, saying that on the one hand what you owned wasn't the disk it was a license to the content so you couldn't just do whatever you wanted with it, but if you tried to use that to say "well then I can rip the DVD and copy it somewhere else" you'd get an argument about only owning that specific format.
  - DrJokepu 14y ago
    Yes it is. You need a license for public performances of copyrighted works; in America this is governed by Title 17 of the United States Code.
cake93 14y ago
The third party (reseller) who bought the seed from Monsanto in the first place most probably breached the contract by producing and selling new seeds! This third party is probably the one who is to be sued, but patent law allows the farmer to be sued as well..
- Retric 14y ago
  The can also only be sued once, where the farmer and everyone after that point could continue to resell dwecendents of that line.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

rtpg 14y ago

> Monsanto says that if it allowed Bowman to keep replanting his seeds it would undermine its business model, endangering the expensive research that it uses to produce advanced agricultural products. I didn't realize that having a bad business model gave you a valid case.

bjelkeman-again 14y ago
But our politicians have decided otherwise and allows for patents even on DNA sequences that weren't even constructed but merely discovered.
- El_Mariachi 14y ago
  Those patents are on identifying, isolating, and extracting those sequences. Making a new copy of them in your body (or in the case of soybeans, growing the plant, which obviously involves DNA replication) isn't infringing, but doing anything else useful with them is.
latch 14y ago
Devil's advocate: How do you suggest companies with large R&D budgets doing work that can potentially benefit humanity recoupe its costs. The question applies to GMOs where the product can often reproduce as well as medical companies where generics are involved.
- rwallace 14y ago
  How do you suggest we finance lighthouses without arresting people and putting them in prison for the crime of walking down a road that happens to be in line of sight of a lighthouse while not wearing a company-approved blindfold? As a libertarian I think we should seek a smaller role for government in people's lives. But I also think if something is in fact a function of government, we would be better off to admit it and formally finance it as such, than bring it in the back door by dishonest means.
  - deleted 14y ago

dragonbonheur 14y ago

Q: What does it take to make a multi-million company and its over-qualified employees forget that the purpose of life is to SPREAD? A: GREED.

DigitalSea 14y ago

Don't get me started on the evil company that is Monsanto. For those of you who aren't aware of the history of this company I strongly suggest you do some reading if you have the time. We're talking about a company more aggressive and protective of its patents than Apple or any tech company anyone has ever seen before. History has proven that the courts aren't exactly all too good at delivering fair, unbiased and swift justice when it comes to a Monsanto vs (insert rural farmer here) cases. I hope Bowman wins this case, it'll hopefully set a precedent and example that Monsanto can't walk over family farmers trying to make an honest living. Most of the prior cases Monsanto has brought against farmers usually end up being settled because the defendant runs out of money to keep fighting and ends up losing everything they own. It's companies like Monsanto that are ruining family farming. If this continues farming as we know it will cease to exist in the traditional sense as we all know it and eventually the only farms that will exist will be corporately owned ones.

dhathorn 14y ago
Why is family farming worth protecting? What extra value do family farms provide to me, the person actually buying food? People lose their jobs because superior companies out-compete them all the time. Why should farmers be protected from this?
- Panoramix 14y ago
  Food is essential for society and it strikes me as a very bad idea to leave it all in the hands of a selfish mega corporation with an exceptionally poor track record.
  - refurb 14y ago
    Medicine is essential for society as well. Would you like to take it out of the hands of the mega corporations as well? Who exactly would be making the new drugs? And don't say the gov't. They gov't's track record of producing new drugs is negligible. Gov't funding contributing to new drugs? Yes, of course. But gov't funding playing a major role in putting a new drug in a patient? Minimal.

El_Mariachi 14y ago

You don't patent things, you patent methods. Monsanto has patented a method of inserting and manipulating certain gene sequences in soybeans. Growing offspring of existing modified beans is not the same as performing the modification. If they wanted their seeds to have an expiration date they should have engineered that in there too. Soybean replicants.

lutusp 14y ago
> You don't patent things, you patent methods. That may be true now. There was a time, not so long ago, that a patent was denied to any idea that had not been reduced to practice, in a working physical embodiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_to_practice Quote: "In United States patent law, the reduction to practice is a concept meaning the embodiment of the concept of an invention. The date of this embodiment is critical to the determination of priority between inventors in an interference proceeding." (I hasten to add that the above rule about priority no longer applies. Because of recent changes, the U.S. is changing to a first-to-file system.) Quote: "A 'working model' is usually a strong evidence to demonstrate actual reduction to practice. Unlike patent models of the 18th and 19th century, a working model is no longer a requirement of the U.S. patent law." All this has been swept away by changes in the law, and we have the present patent system in which the patent office rubber-stamps virtually anything, and claimants work things out in court.
jrkelly 14y ago
You can patent things other than methods. For example, If you invent a novel chemical you can patent it - that's the basis of the pharma industry business model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter

cduan 14y ago

So here's what I gather, after having read the lower court opinion and several of the briefs. Monsanto owns a patent on certain soybean seeds. They sell 1G seeds to farmers, allowing the farmers to grow them into 2G seeds. The farmers are not licensed to plant the 2G seeds. Bowman bought some 2G seeds and planted them, and Monsanto sued. Bowman says that the planting of 2G seeds is permitted under the doctrine of "patent exhaustion." According to that doctrine, if a patented physical object is sold under proper license, then a patent lawsuit involving that same physical object is not permitted, even if the object is sold to someone else. The lower court said that patent exhaustion doesn't apply to the 2G seeds, because Monsanto only granted a license on the 1G seeds. The 1G seeds are not the same physical object as the 2G seeds. At first I thought this was a simple case, but Bowman is making a very interesting argument in the Supreme Court. It is based on an old case called Quanta. In Quanta, the patent was directed to a certain computer process, and the patent owner sold computer chips with circuitry for performing that process. The chips themselves were useless, of course, but they just needed to be combined with some standard hardware and turned on to work. Did this mean that, by adding the extra hardware, a new physical object had been made that could be the subject of a lawsuit? The Supreme Court said no: because the chips "embodied" the patented invention and only required standard hardware to be added, the chips invoked patent exhaustion, so lawsuits based on their further use were barred. Bowman's argument: the 1G seeds "embody" the invention (by having the DNA and biological machinery to produce 2G seeds), and only "standard hardware" (soil, watering, etc.) needs to be added to get the working invention (the 2G seeds), so therefore the 2G seeds fall under patent exhaustion. The main counterargument is that in Quanta, the original computer chips were still present and intact, whereas the 2G seeds do not include the 1G seeds intact. This requires a narrower interpretation of Quanta, and I could see the Supreme Court going with either this narrower reading or Bowman's broader one. (For fun, you can try to come up with hypothetical cases that are in between: what if the patentee in Quanta had sold semiconductor masks for making chips?)

belorn 14y ago
Do an product need to be intact to count? If this is the core of Monsanto argument, then it sounds to me as completely rubbish and something a court should have no problems throwing out. Lets say I bought a new mousetrap. After purchase, I go around and add/remove aspect of it. I change the color scheme. I change the cheese to a more smelly version. Has it now suddenly become a new mousetrap and is thus no longer the same physical object as first sold? If the seed still embodies the details described in the patent, how is it not still the same object? I could understand Monsanto counterargument if no aspect of 1G seed existed in the 2G seed but thats of course not true. More likely, all patented aspect of 1G seed is all still in 2G seed. If that was not true, than even if Monsanto won, they would loose as they then would have no claim on 2G. Thus the only changes of 1G -> 2G must be trivial and not covered by the patent.

pingou 14y ago

I hate Monsanto as much as everyone else but I agree with them in this case. If farmers are permitted to replant seeds then how are companies making the seeds supposed to make money ? I believe GM are a chance to humanity, with the potential to feed more and more people. But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ? And as far as I know, these seeds allow farmers to use massive doses of roundup, if this guy used some roundup on his crops it's fair to say he perfectly knows these were gm seeds and that he wasn't allowed to use it for free. If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it and do like farmers always did, with standard seeds.

fla 14y ago
> But why develop it and spend millions on R&D if everybody can copy your product for free ? A very bad business model indeed.
- veemjeem 14y ago
  Wouldn't that apply to software & video media as well? AMC sells me a movie, then I copy it and send it to all my friends with no loss in quality for free. Companies then spend tons of money inventing DRM and copy protection techniques. Should Monsanto produce a modified seed that produces seedless fruit? Of course this wouldn't work for products where the seed is the consumable end result (soybean, corn). It seems like Monsanto's business model is no better than our's (software) when one can copy the product easily and distribute it. The only difference is that there are very few seed manufacturers so Monsanto stands alone at trial. Suppose in the future when seed genetic programmers are as common as indie software shops, should these genetic programmers have similar IP protections that software people take for granted?
  - fla 14y ago
    I don't know. My personal feeling is all this patent stuff sounds horribly wrong, be it software or living organisms.
  - agilord 14y ago

meric 14y ago

If Monsanto patent a method of genetically modifying my child's genes (so that he is more resistant to cancer, for example), does that mean my child cannot have children without paying a license fee to Monsanto, otherwise he/she is liable for patent infringement?

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
If Monsato patents a virus, and it spreads out of control, can those affected, whose bodies produce more of the virus, be sued for patent infringement?
- veemjeem 14y ago
  Yes, but they didn't. Your straw-man argument is pretty inaccurate here. The lawsuit isn't about the accidental cross pollination of genes. It's probably closer to duplicating copyright works by someone who bought one copy.
mattdeboard 14y ago
It depends if they made your child pesticide-resistant or not
mattdeboard 14y ago
It depends if they made your child pesticide-resistant or not
bane 14y ago
bingo, you've just described every genegenering company's wet dream, patent licenses fees in perpetuity, that also exponentially increase with each generation

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

To me this raises interesting questions of wider infrastructure regulation. The supply of gas to homes is heavily regulated in every country - but regulations over who owns a seed? No one ever thought such a thing possible. The same goes for Internet search - if Google goes broke or looses its backups or charges 1 pound a month subscription what happens? Do we need a law of innovation-to-infrastructure? Once a company achieves some innovation that is sooooo part of the world that it seems like infrastructure, do we prevent it from monetizing the same in some counter productive manner? Do we produce a oversight committee I squirm inwardly at half those words - but then again my gas supply works, at a affordable rate.

jessaustin 14y ago
Does the gas company do a great deal of R&D? Sure there's R&D involved in extraction and refining, but you seem to be talking about distribution. I think you may be talking about the (incorrect) idea that large infrastructure assets must be protected by state-enforced monopoly. Large infrastructure assets do not need this protection, and I blame Ma Bell for popularizing the idea (at least in the USA) that they do. There's actually a huge natural gas rollout taking place in my community right now: http://www.summitnaturalgas.com/view/92 http://www.summitnaturalgas.com/view/92 This is a large investment, which involves laying hundreds of miles of pipe and boring under the Lake of the Ozarks in three different places (in one location parallel to a privately-funded highway bridge). I understand that investors expect to be paid back over decades. Yet, no one appointed Summit to do this work, any more than anyone appointed Google or Monsanto to do what they do. Anyone in the world with an internet connection and a server farm is free to compete with Google. On day one when they turn the tap on their pipeline, Summit will be competing with numerous propane suppliers, the local incumbent electric companies, and even the long-term possibility (however remote) of another group building another natural gas pipeline. If Summit and Google don't need state protection, why would Monsanto?
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I am not saying state protection - more like state-encouraged-socially-beneficial-behaviour Tomorrow will change so fast that relying on 75 year old farmers to take on esoteric legal points to enforce social benefit is a little unreliable

newsmaster 14y ago

Funny I just watched a documentary a few days ago about Monsanto and how some GM crops strip the lining and the gut causing a myriad of health problems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnlTYFKBg18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnlTYFKBg18 Not sure how much of it is fact though.

tarr11 14y ago

This guy needs a kickstarter campaign. He can send us some 2G soybeans from his farm if he wins the case and we can all plant them in our gardens.

coin 14y ago

Unrelated, but their mobile version of the page is utterly unusable on my iPad 1. Wished they just served up the non-mobile version.

mattmcknight 14y ago

Why this link from "rawstory" instead of the guardian? http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/09/soybean-farmer-monsanto-supreme-court http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/09/soybean-farmer-mon...

anuy 14y ago

http://www.globalresearch.ca/killer-seeds-the-devastating-impacts-of-monsanto-s-genetically-modified-seeds-in-india/28629 http://www.globalresearch.ca/killer-seeds-the-devastating-im... Killer Seeds The irony is GM seeds have not been effective in India and the consequences are not as rosy as what Monsanto had promised to deliver. Scathing reports of mass suicides of Indian farmers broke out as recently as three years ago when scores of farmers took their own lives in order to escape the burden of high prices and failure of Monsanto’s GM seeds. Monsanto offered its GM seeds to the farmers of India with hopes of reaping plentiful crops. Plain and mostly uneducated farmers thought Monsanto had come to provide a “magic” formula that would transform their lives. They had no idea what was coming. Monsanto’s seeds in India did not produce what the company had promised and farmers hoped. The expensive seeds piled up debts and destroyed farming fields. In many instances, the crops simply failed to materialize. The farmers were not aware that the GM seeds required more water than the traditional seeds. And lack of rain in many parts of India exacerbated the crop failure.

coditor 14y ago

The argument not being made here is this: why should you be able to patent DNA sequences? Sure Monsanto is patenting the method to create the sequences, but enforcing the end result of the method (seeds) doesn't make any sense as a patent. It's like patenting a machine that makes widgets, then suing people who don't use the widgets the way you'd like them to.

Qantourisc 14y ago

What happens when a bag falls of the transport, and grows a patch ? Next the seeds drop and make a bigger patch. Who needs to pay the patent fees mother nature ? Another scenario: cross-breeding with other crops due to bees. Your strain could get copied to the field next door: NEW problem. And for all the evil corporations out there: make as many seeds as you can. Next put them in an airplain and spread them EVERYWHERE you can. Wait 3 yeas for the strain to spread and sew EVERYONE. In essence you a selling a self-replicating machine not under your control ... And they don't see an issue here ? A better way to "reward" these companies (if we want genetic mutated strains) let them prove the worth they create and pay it off by the government, since they serve the entire community. (And hope there is no corruption or abuse on the system.)

nlh 14y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot since I first read about it yesterday. Here's what I think is _fair_ (throwing out doctrine, etc.). IA(definitely)NAL. Monsanto has every right to get a patent on the 1G seeds. They have every right to sell those seeds -- they put money and effort into designing a (theoretically) improved product and should be rewarded for their investment. Once they sell the 1G seeds, however, that's it. If the resulting plants produce equal-quality 2G seeds, then so be it. Once the farmer has purchased the 1G seeds (presumably from Monsanto), that's the end of the road for Monsanto. They've produced a product, sold it, and made their money. What's happening here is that Monsanto is using the courts to compensate for a bad business model and a flaw in their design. If they want to continue to get farmers to purchase seeds from them year after year, then what they should have done is engineered the seeds to "expire" after a generation: The results plants should produce 2G seeds that are in some way inferior to the 1G seeds. That way, farmers have a natural incentive to keep purchasing 1G seeds year after year. No lawsuits or restrictive license agreements needed. If farmers want the best, they buy from Monsanto. If they are ok with the inferior 2G seeds, then they can harvest their own and keep planting. If it's not possible for Monsanto to engineer the seeds as such, well, too bad. The buck stops there. They need to charge more for the 1G seeds then. But farmers won't pay if the cost is too high? Well, again, too bad. Their job is to convince farmers that buying 1G seeds at 2-3x the price is worth it because of the improved product. If not, well, back to the drawing board. This comes down to Monsanto trying to use a license agreement and the courts to compensate for a flaw in their product design, and that isn't right.

crusso 14y ago
I agree. Further, if Monsanto wants to reap the benefit of their product's self-reproduction; they should be required to pay cleanup costs (by the EPA? Department of Agriculture?) to remove "contaminated" soybeans from the rest of the environment. It's not this farmer's fault that Monsanto's product has polluted the stock of available leftover soybeans. Monsanto should be the entity on the hook here, not the farmer.
sshumaker 14y ago
They do own technology to achieve this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology#section_3 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techn... It basically prevents G2 seeds altogether, but they've pledged not to use it because of public outcry, instead relying on these contracts. If you seriously think through the consequences of usage of this kind of tech, it's pretty dire. Due to natural cross-pollination, we could be setting ourselves up for a world where everyone must buy all of their seeds from Monsanto and their ilk, who would have a monopoly on the world's food supply. That's bad news indeed.

falcolas 14y ago

To me, the following is the worst part of this entire story: "... it is ironically Bowman’s own lack of cash that has seen the case end up at the supreme court." Why does it take someone being bankrupt and having "nothing to loose" to get a case like this brought forward? It seems like a perversion of the concept of the court systems.

lilsunnybee 14y ago
Seems like the best part to me. Usually unless you're well-off or wealthy, justice is hard to come by. In this case its the argument that matters, not the weight of wealth behind it.

rfugger 14y ago

The Supreme Court of Canada heard a similar case 9 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmei... (Spoiler alert: Monsanto won.)

shill 14y ago

My question is, will Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from a case involving his former employer?

kostko 14y ago

Oh god. Can we just stop following the law in something so obvious? What's fair and normal for 10000000 of years, has recently been changed by some writings on a paper. And don't give me the 'you let this slip but where do you draw the line next time'. Humanity has become so obsessed with these rules, guidelines, standards, that we've imprisoned ourselves for the sake of a few bucks. In the end, there will be just one factory with a big tomato logo on it, from which all the worlds tomatoes will come.