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Short answer: No. Long answer: The question is sparked by a recent court case where a farmer - named Bowman - purposefully used unlicensed technology on a co
by Lazare 14y ago
Short answer: No.
Long answer: The question is sparked by a recent court case where a farmer - named Bowman - purposefully used unlicensed technology on a commercial scale. If you are doing it by accident, or aren't doing it on a commercial scale, you're perfectly safe. (Some reporting in the popular press makes it sound like Bowman was unaware of his infringement or that it was an accident - a lot of people are freaking out at the idea of Monsanto suing a farmer because some patented seeds happened to be found on his property. If you read the court case, it becomes clear that nothing of the kind happened, and that if it had the case would have been thrown out.)
Really, it's just like every other bit of patented tech. If you're operating a factory pumping out unlicensed Rolex watches, you've got some potential legal liability. If you bought a fake watch in Bangkok, you don't. While I personally have some very serious qualms about the patents on GM crops, the current legal situation is, honestly, pretty sane. Hobbyists are perfectly safe, as are farmers acting in good faith (ie, they plant seeds believing them to be unpatented, or their seeds are contaminated by patented seeds blown across their property line). Activists like to construct scary hypotheticals, but the truth is rather more prosaic.
- windexh8er 14y agoI think your first paragraph would likely be relegated to spin. While your oversimplification of the problem makes it seem acutely cut and dry the short response is: it's not that simple. Like all other constraints of life in general, I think going lax on things like a separation of an ill corporation and the direct corollary effect it poses to something nature has originally derived is treading in unknown territory. The fact that this simple question would have been laughable at best 15 years ago showcases the downward spiral into everything being a legal matter in the not so distant future. You may think this is counterproductive activism but skim the history books. Look around you and reflect on the choices that others have made to put your in your first world situation. That can quickly change if there aren't people who keep those ideals in check and balance out the corporate tendencies that often times spins out of control when left to its own device. That is a path where morals take a back seat to suits and dollars more often than not.
- cmccabe 14y ago> If you are doing it by accident, or aren't > doing it on a commercial scale, you're perfectly safe. Sigh. I wish people would stop repeating this. It's not true. If you infringe a patent "willfully" (i.e., you know about it, and have reason to believe it applies to you) you can be subject to triple damages. But you aren't safe just because you didn't know about the patent. And doing something "non-commercially" means little. We all know that estimates of commercial harm can be manipulated-- looking at the damages that are routinely awarded in copyright infringement cases should be enough to convince you of that.
- roel_v 14y ago"If you bought a fake watch in Bangkok, you don't." I'm in your team wrt the practical implications of plant patents being overblown, but this example is not correct. Your watch will be confiscated by customs if they find it, and if you do it several times or are carrying a number of them sufficiently large to make it plausible that you're going to resell them (e.g., a number like '5'), you might be looking at administrative penalties and/or criminal prosecution.