This will inevitably draw comparisons to Knuth's METAFONT and Computer Modern font family (as it should). It does suggest, to me, one particularly interesting use case: one could automatically measure parameters for an existing font, and generate similar-looking characters that might be missing from the font (e.g., small caps, Greek letters, Cyrillic, etc.). I programmed this once many years ago, using some ridiculously complicated PostScript and METAFONT programming, but I've since forgotten how that old code works.
The point of PG's essay is well-taken, but I'm not really sure how the linked article really applies other than at a superficial level. I can't find a recent press release from which this article was derived; the closest one is the cited Bain & Co. note from Oct. 2012, which is pretty old by current standards.
Additionally, the reporter here seems to have at least done a modicum of original research, given that he's quoting actual clothing makers. This is in contrast with the USA Today article cited in PG's essay, which quoted a PR guy, a GQ editor, and a consultant.
Thus, to the extent that the submarine theory applies here, it's probably just to show the long reach that a well-manufactured eight-year-old marketing campaign can have. But there were plenty of other marketing campaigns from that time that didn't stick around this long, so maybe that's an indicator that there is some real substance to this trend?
Of course, I've only done a little research into this. If someone can turn up the actual press release or other marketing push from which this article was derived, I will gladly reverse my opinion.
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?)
What bothers me is that there are people that would spend a lot of time and effort on splitting legal hairs over this, rather than to simply state that such patents are ridiculous and then we can all get on with our lives. This whole patenting of natural organisms is disgusting at a fundamental level.
They aren't patenting natural organisms. In this case, they are patenting specific modifications that provides glyophosphate resistance. This is a fairly legit patent, and if you don't believe this should occur; then basically any patent modifying organisms should be banned, which will have far reaching consequences not just to agriculture, but medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials.
They are not patenting specific modifications, they are patenting certain DNA sequences. These patents as completely bogus. Monsanto also has a patent for a certain DNA sequence found in hogs/pigs that causes them to produce more meat. The DNA sequence was naturally found in a certain breed/line of hogs/pigs in Germany and Monsanto has gone after the farmers that have these pigs, which have been raised naturally for generations, and sued them to make them pay for their pigs having a certain DNA sequence. It's ludicrous!
EDIT: One could say that those pigs could be considered prior art... even so, you have a multibillion multinational company vs several small family farmers. Who's going to pay the lawyers to defend the family farmers... even to show prior "art"? What realm of delusion and craziness do we have to go to stop arguing about this?
EDIT 2: "patenting specific modifications" tries to imply patenting a process, and fails. "patenting certain DNA sequences" implies patenting the end result of a process.
EDIT 3: I don't have a problem with them having a patent on a particular process to generate the DNA sequences so long as the process reliably results in the organism having the desired DNA sequence. Otherwise the patent would be for a generic process to modify DNA sequences. These patents restrict the use of the methods but not the end results. Monsanto wants to charge and claim ownership of any organism that has the desired DNA sequences. Monsantos business model is flawed and the patent system should not be used to protect Monsantos revenue streams.
This is a good example of why patenting a process is acceptable, but patenting the end result is bad.
If Monsanto patented the process itself to create these dna sequences, the German farmers would not be infringing on their patent because they use completely different processes to produce the DNA: one is generated in a lab, the other is consummated in a sty.
If Monsanto found this strain of DNA and managed to reproduce it in a lab and developed a process of mass production, there is no reason they should not be able to profit from the endeavor. There is also no reason why they should be able to sue the farmers. The farmers aren't using their process for producing the dna sequences.
The fact that they could patent the sequences and sue the farmers speaks volumes about the broken state of patents. (As most everyone in tech already knew)
It probably wouldn't. Copyright in this situation isnt bad per se, but we've all seen how much its been abused in practice, so clearly the moral/ethical issues would be astounding.
EDIT 4: Perhaps, they might say or claim that through their R&D they were able to identify and produce a pig (or plant) that contains the desired sequence of DNA then if they find that desired sequence of DNA in another pig (or plant) they assume that their process was used/abused to obtain the DNA sequence and immediately sue putting an undue burden on the defendants who often don't have the resources to effectively defend themselves. This is still abusing the patent/legal system.
What do you think about changing civil suits like this (that someone has stolen someone else's "property") to require a criminal conviction first? What other ideas do you have for "fixing" this problem?
Honestly, I think you are saying things that are just plain untrue. Can you actually point to a single actual monsanto patent that is claiming some sequence and not the invention of making a plant glypshosphate resistant? My guess is you can't, because it would almost be impossible to issue and even it was it wouldn't hold up in court.
That's what I meant with 'people splitting legal hairs'.
Which part of 'modifying a natural organism and patenting that modification which then can spread through the normal means of natural replication is fundamentally wrong' is it that is giving you problems?
I know the patent is legit, I understand that such patents are common and that is exactly where I see the problem.
What the far reaching consequences are is beyond my grasp, all I see is a money grab by a very large company at the expense of those that do the hard work to feed us, and that they are concentrating on staple foods because getting a substantial royalty on staple foods puts the world at their feet.
See 'basmati' and a bunch of other stunts they've tried.
What? This is exactly the opposite situation. It is a money grab, all right, but by a farmer who wants to extract all of the value out of Monsanto's tech by exploiting a "loop hole" in the agreement he signed with them.
Here's the deal: farmers are under zero obligation to use genetically modified seeds. They are free to use traditional seeds. Why don't they do that, then? Because Monsanto's technology is a really, really good deal for them! It produces better yields at lower costs. It is not ridiculous to establish legal systems that protect the further development of such technologies and your small-farmer-versus-the-mega-corp Disney movie synopsis adds nothing to the conversation.
I'm not sure what you are quoting, but the problem I have with your quote is that you are saying all modern biotechnology should have no intellectual property protection.
Yes, patenting any modification to an organism should be banned.
It's fun an games when we laugh about the patent wars between Google/Samsung and Apple. But our food supply? I'll be the first to grab a torch and a pitchfork. Fark Monsanto.
Then let us cry tears for those poor, oppressed corporations in agriculture, medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials. It's getting hard to even clear a billion on the ledgers annually.
Truly, these institutions of capital and ~=SCIENCE=~ are more worthy of our aid than the starving, the poor, and the destitute humans across the world.
EDIT: Do you support software patents? All this seems to be doing is reprogramming a living organism, no?
All these companies in agriculture, medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials have made the world a dramatically better place as a result of their capital investment into science. They work in fields where scientific innovation is very expensive, and keep working because there is a potential return on their investment. Their inventions benefit everyone--the patent system simply lets them capture some of that benefit to justify their investment.
Without Monsanto, the hardy seeds in this case wouldn't even exist. The patent here isn't just protecting Monsanto from poor destitute farmers (and suing farmers is a terrible PR move for Monsanto here). What it's really protecting Monsanto from the inevitable copycat company that would come along, buy a bag of Monsanto seeds, and cultivate them, undercutting Monsanto on price because they didn't have to put in any capital investment.
All these companies in agriculture, medicine, bioenergy, chemicals, and biomaterials have made the world a dramatically better place as a result of their capital investment into science.
Be careful here--this is not an airtight statement. Many of the innovations are arguably simply correcting earlier innovations...mass insulin production is a great feat, but how much of that is used to fix diabetes caused by overconsumption of bad food? How much agriculture research is spent making poorly-processed food more palatable, or making crops resistant to synthetic pesticides?
A lot of innovation may simply be correcting problems that didn't exist before some other innovation happened.
They work in fields where scientific innovation is very expensive, and keep working because there is a potential return on their investment.
Perhaps we should find ways of driving the cost of innovation down? Like, say, loosening patent and licensing burdens to make equipment more easily attainable?
What it's really protecting Monsanto from the inevitable copycat company that would come along, buy a bag of Monsanto seeds, and cultivate them, undercutting Monsanto on price because they didn't have to put in any capital investment.
Agreed, but I do not see the necessary harm in this--again, having a strong brand and good distribution networks and quality products is how they can protect themselves against such a thing. In an optimized market, profit margins are indeed slim--and I suggest that for food production we want an optimized market.
mass insulin production is a great feat, but how much of that is used to fix diabetes caused by overconsumption of bad food?
wow, this is a stretch. You realize that there is also Type I (juvenile) diabetes that is an auto-immune/genetic disorder that has nothing to do with unhealthy eating? GMO-produced human insulin (and subsequent engineered insulin analogs that are faster-acting) were major milestone for making that disease into a lifelong treatable condition. As someone with a father who is a juvenile diabetic now pushing into his 60s I'm pretty glad we're OK making capital investments in hard sciences.
> Perhaps we should find ways of driving the cost of innovation down? Like, say, loosening patent and licensing burdens to make equipment more easily attainable?
A very small portion of R&D budgets go to patent licensing. At the end of the day, what's expensive is that hundreds of PhD's expect to make six figure salaries even if their work is benefitting mankind.
> Agreed, but I do not see the necessary harm in this--again, having a strong brand and good distribution networks and quality products is how they can protect themselves against such a thing
Well now you're trading one kind of IP (patents) for another (Trademark). And what if the other company that swoops in is Con Agra?
just because patents are the regulatory regime that exist at this time, in this place does not mean that that is the only way to regulate and encourage research in any given field of endeavor.
Given the extremity of the consequences and the enormity of the benefits that the biological sciences could provide us; it is worth questioning a regulatory regime that provides such painful distortions of society and that seems to act as much to prevent the benefits from being widespread as it does to allow the researchers to evade liability for the negative externalities.
Thank you! Dissecting arguments and playing lawyer is fun sometimes, but not when the stakes are real. Even if legal precedent comes down for Monsanto, that just means that the legal precedent is wrong or incomplete, so who cares what the precedent can be manipulated to indicate... Monsanto is in the wrong here, regardless of how this thing turns out and regardless of how the law ends up being interpreted by the court.
I disagree. They patented a scientific process, which is what patents were originally designed for. This is a case where patents are actually not disgusting. (If I am misinterpreting the patent, please let me know)
Should chemists have not been allowed to patent the Haber Process? That is a chemical reaction. If chemical reactions are occuring all around us, isnt it disgusting to be able to patent it? No, because patenting a scientific process is a (the?) legitimate patent use case.
pull to refresh is a disgusting patent. Any of the patents mentioned recently by Samsung or Apple are disgusting. This isn't.
You aren't seeing the distinction between a patented process for producing roundup ready seed and a patent on the lifeform and all of it's descendants in perpetuity.
The owner of the Haber Process patent has no say in what the ammonia gets used for after they have sold said ammonia. Nor should they.
This case is a bit different than the Haber process because these seeds are used to produce organisms that manufacture more of the seeds. If you are patenting the process to manufacture this type of GM soybean seed, won't it cover any process that is used to manufacture these seeds, including plants in a field? It is a tricky issue, and I don't know what the precedent is.
However, if they did patent the organism itself, or the result of the process (as e40 said in a sibling comment), then I am against this type patent.
Personally, I think IP law should be small and narrowly defined. I think that patents are valid when it is a scientific (ie non-trivial) process that has a limited duration.
EDIT: After thinking about it, I think the distinction comes down to this: are they selling it? if so they have no ownership rights on the next generation of seeds. Are they licensing it? If so, yes they do have ownership of the next generation of seeds. In that case, they are licensing to you a manufacturing process where you are allowed to sell the output, but you do not own the process itself.
Yeah, the analogy to the Haber process, like most analogies, falls apart pretty quickly.
I like that distinction between selling and licensing. It clears things up a bit and also exposes the ridiculous/terrifying consequences of being able to license lifeforms.
We're certainly not far away from modification of humans, at least in small ways, so we better have it figured out by then. If you, through some patented process, gave your children some genes for disease resistance the legal framework in place for agriculture would have the preposterous effect of giving patent holders control over how they were allowed to reproduce. Bit of hyperbolic example surely, but still an instructive one IMO.
No, they abused their knowledge of how seeds work in order to rent-seek on a process that worked just fine for untold hundreds of thousands of years without Monsanto.
"Rent seeking" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. Rent seeking means to try and extract rents from a process that would have happened without you. Rent seeking would be if the farmer had, through traditional agricultural processes, come up with a seed that had glyophosphate resistance, and Monsanto had sued him on the theory that they owned the patent to glyophosphate resistant seeds.
But that's not what happened. Without Monsanto, the glyophosphate resistant seeds in question would not exist. The farmer in question was free to use regular old soybean seeds and get regular old soybeans. Nobody forced him to use Monsanto's seeds--he did so because he got a benefit from them, a benefit that was the result of Monsanto's invention and its investment in R&D.
It's not so black-and-white as this. You can typically buy excess seeds from the local grain elevator for replanting; these now contain an unseperable proportion of the descendants of Monsanto's seeds, so it's at least become lot harder not to use any of them.
In other cases (not this one), the farmer's field has been cross-contaminated from nearby fields of GMO soy, so they have been forced to use the descendants of Monsanto seed. Are these cases different? Why, in patent law? (Patent infringement does not require intent).
The environment that Monsanto are trying to create is one in which you must pay a royalty to Monsanto if your crop contains any of the descendants of their seeds, and where completely avoiding their seeds is impossible or at least very difficult (and imposes new costs).
But the process I assume you're referring to (farmers saving seeds) has changed, and just in the past 50-75 years. Now farms are massive monocultures and are susceptible to pests so they require pesticide resistent crops.
Whether you think that's a good thing or not is another story. Or maybe you think farmers should be able to save GMO seeds. I won't argue with you there, but the process of farming most definitely has changed, and it's not the same as it was thousands of years go.
"What bothers me is that there are people that would spend a lot of time and effort on splitting legal hairs over this, rather than to simply state that such patents are ridiculous and then we can all get on with our lives."
The only way that the people this directly affects can get on with their lives is by "splitting legal hairs". You can't just say "I disbelieve" and suddenly disempower all systems you disagree with.
Playing group politics is non-sensical here. That farmer will happily invoke the legal system on you for trespassing on his property, why should we be so sympathetic now that Monsanto has invoked the legal system for his trespassing on theirs?
Monsanto thinks its theirs, and they've got a non-trivial legal argument behind their contention. They'll take you to court to enforce their rights, just like the farmer will if you trespass on his land or try to worm your way out of a purchase contract if prices go down, or if he thinks you did those things.
If Monsanto is wrong and they have no such legal right, that's fine. They'll lose in court, or at least they ought to. But you're making it seem like we should put a thumb on the scale in favor of farmers, just because they're farmers. Everyone takes advantage of the law when it serves their purposes. Indeed, a tremendous amount of law is traceable to serving the purposes of farmers (versus say hunters/gatherers). Indeed, even things we think of as modern instruments, like derivatives contracts, have their roots in farming.
I should note: I don't disagree that Monsanto shouldn't have a claim when farmers don't know their seeds have GMO DNA, either as a result of cross-pollination or not knowing the origins of the seeds. I think it's a weakness of the patent system that "intent" doesn't count for anything.
Indeed, a tremendous amount of law is traceable to serving the purposes of farmers (versus say hunters/gatherers).
This might be one of my all-time favorite HN comments, because it's caused me to imagine how weird real property would look to the hunter-gatherer only used to personal property, and all the arguments they would use to make against the concept of real property.
One can see the hunter-gatherers gathered up around Hunter News long ago:
* Some farmer somewhere has decided that the crops he just left laying around are somehow his! Well, that makes no sense. If they were his, he should have kept them on his person! Everyone knows that! It's perfectly obvious that things you leave lying around belong to everyone and the next person who can pick it up gets to use it!
* They call it "real property" but it's not "property" -- you can't take it with you! Duh!
* Oh, sure, they try to say the ways it's like personal property, like the person who made it has a moral right to it, or that they wouldn't have built that house if they didn't get to keep it. Balderdash!
* Someone explain to me why you even need "real property" for society to function. It seems we didn't have it for thousands of years and everything worked okay!
* Did you know that under "real property" you can be excluded from certain land, just because someone else "says" it's theirs?
* What are they going to do, put a cop on every single piece of land to make sure no one trespasses? This will collapse under its own weight.
> * Did you know that under "real property" you can be excluded from certain land, just because someone else "says" it's theirs?
The interesting part is that most developed countries do still have structures in place to explicitly restrict the ability of landowners from preventing access to certain land. Either in the form of laws, or through public ownership.
E.g. in Norway there's a concept called "allemannsretten" ("public rights") that explicitly guarantee the right of the public to access "utmark" which is effectively any non-built-up part of land outside of urban cores. On top of that, there are special building restrictions on building near the coast line to ensure public access to beaches or the sea in general. Not only can you walk through any forest you please, no matter whether someone owns it, but you can gather berries or mushrooms there without obtaining permission. You do however generally need their permission to hunt.
In the US and elsewhere it is more commonly provided for through massive government ownership. E.g. federal land in the US makes up a massive 28% of the land mass. In the UK the Crown Estate owns more than half the coast, and massive amounts of other land, etc.
But while we've shifted substantially towards favouring private land owners, we still recognise that unfettered private property rights substantially restricts the freedom of movement of others.
You just moved the goalposts. In the comment Rayiner replied to, you invoked us-vs-them, but when challenged, you retreat to a substantive claim. Why not just concede his point and move on with your broader argument?
I don't think it was me that moved to the 'trespassing' analogy.
Monsanto claims those seeds are their intellectual property, when actually it is the process of modifying the seeds that they came up with. So they are claiming trespassing where in my view there is no such thing happening, they are claiming trespass on a public road.
The groups of people that I indicated that were splitting legal hairs over this can be divided into those that make a living splitting legal hairs and those that make a living plowing earth. If you feel that the latter are undeserving of protection against the former then fine, I concede. Personally I think that they should be allowed to get on with their lives without the IP battle being extended to their fields (pun intended).
It serves no purpose and I don't think that anything good can/will come of it, and potentially some very bad stuff may be the end result.
Now you're back to your original argument, which is that farmers are morally superior to lawyers because they plow the earth. How can that possibly make sense? There are legal protections that should be enjoyed by farmers but not lawyers?
That was Rayiner's response to you and it seems self-evidently true. We strive towards a rule of law, not a rule of farmers, or a rule of philosopher kings who pick the meritorious occupations and penalize the rest.
Vernon Bowman didn't simply plant Roundup-Ready seeds by accident. He purchased clearly-marked Roundup-Ready seeds at commodity seed prices and then sprayed his fields with glyphosphate-based herbicides to take advantage of it. That isn't Monsanto's contention; Bowman admits to having done it. Maybe he's right and there's a patent exhaustion claim that makes doing that lawful, but it's hard to argue that Monsanto shouldn't have their day in court to verify it.
> but it's hard to argue that Monsanto shouldn't have their day in court to verify it.
No, it's in fact very easy to argue that. And in case you failed to notice that was exactly my point. Farmers work their ground, they've been doing so for many thousands of years.
Intellectual property and farming should be mutually exclusive fields, anybody should be able to grow anything to the best of their ability without the fear of being sued. I know that you disagree with this, that you believe that it is A-ok for big company 'x' to sue farmer 'y' for violation of their intellectual property (assuming for the moment that such a thing exists) but I'd much prefer for things not to be like that. It's an opinion, you can disagree with it but you can't disallow me to have that opinion or 'force me to concede a point' in which I do not believe.
The rule of law should not extend to your ability to grow food from seeds, to royalties paid on such seeds or to any derivative thereof.
Here you restate the moral superiority of farming over IP enforcement, but miss the fact that were your principle made the law of the land, there would be no Roundup-Ready seeds for Bowman to have planted. Again, the facts of this case are that Bowman directly benefited from Monsanto's product.
Incidentally, the rule of law's grip on the seed trade is centuries (millenia?) old. Agriculture is a very big part of the reason we have law to begin with.
> but miss the fact that were your principle made the law of the land, there would be no Roundup-Ready seeds for Bowman to have planted.
Yes, so he would have planted some other seeds instead. Problem solved. See, farmers will pick that which gives them the best yield, not that which holds the nicest bit of IP, their decision processes don't work in terms of royalties or intellectual property. Farmers buy seeds, farmers plant seeds, farmers tend their crops, harvest and then - hopefully, but definitely not always - make a profit.
What seeds they buy is up to the farmer, and if there had been no sign saying 'roundup ready', price 'x' and if the farmer would have not used roundup he'd be just as guilty according to the law since the law revolves around the fact that the seeds were not legally obtained.
This is so patently ridiculous that I find it somewhat disconcerting to see you arguing that that is a desirable situation. If you BUY something, especially something as basic as a seed you should not have to go and research the chain of events that led to those seeds being offered for sale and whether they are unencumbered from a legal point of view.
He didn't just plant the seeds! He used the entire Roundup-Ready system. Monsanto didn't go after him for accidentally ending up with seeds from their lineage.
If he had planted "some other seeds" and then sprayed them with glyphosphates, he'd have ruined his crop. If he had planted Roundup-Ready seeds and not used Roundup, Monsanto probably wouldn't have cared. I've read a bunch of filings for different Roundup cases, and in every one of the ones I've found, it's alleged that the farmers in question not only planted Roundup-Ready seeds, but also used Roundup instead of conventional herbicides.
> He didn't just plant the seeds! He used the entire Roundup-Ready system.
Yes, I know that. I was just trying to make you see that in the eye of the law that would not matter. The seeds are the problem, not the whole process, it all revolves around the seeds.
> If he had planted "some other seeds" and then sprayed them with glyphosphates, he'd have ruined his crop.
Indeed.
> If he had planted Roundup-Ready seeds and not used Roundup, Monsanto probably wouldn't have cared.
Who knows, but it isn't material whether Monsanto 'cares' or doesn't. After all they're claiming IP rights in the seeds, that's the only thing that matters and they could do so in either case. Of course they would be much less likely to bring suit in that case because it would somewhat reduce their chance of winning wouldn't you say?
> I've read a bunch of filings for different Roundup cases, and in every one of the ones I've found, it's alleged that the farmers in question not only planted Roundup-Ready seeds, but also used Roundup instead of conventional herbicides.
Indeed. And so we are left with a very simple case abstract:
Should a farmer be able to grow any seed that he/she buys on the open market?
As far as you know, he is permitted to grow any seed he buys. I don't understand why this is so hard for you to see. There are two elements to each of these Monsanto cases:
(i) Unsanctioned planting of Monsanto-lineage seeds
(ii) Use of glyphosphate herbicide on the resulting crop
BOTH elements are present in these cases. Not just one.
What else are people going to do with seeds, other than plant them?
And use whatever herbicide works best with these seeds, it's only best practice after all.
Since when does anybody need permission from some company before they can put a seed in the ground?
What if there is a famine, would you allow that farmer to plant the seeds, or would you happily stand by while justice has its day and these evil seeds are destroyed so that Monsanto's legally granted rights are not infringed on?
Really, the world is turning into a stranger place every day that I live in it.
I don't care how weird that sentence is, because by itself, planting unsanctioned seeds doesn't get you sued.
By all means, use whatever conventional herbicide works best on the resulting crops. Just don't spray them with the patented chemical that would kill any soybean that wasn't covered by Monsanto's patent.
The world hasn't been turned upside-down by novel applications of the law. It's been turned upside-down by massive investments in biotech that have enabled us to create magical crops that thrive despite being sprayed with extremely potent herbicides. Your argument here is an appeal to tradition and it's entirely misplaced.
I see lots of computer people do this when discussing a legal case: break it down into little pieces and then insist that each individual piece isn't a crime. (I mentally call it decomposition but law students might have a better term.) Like there must be exactly one sudden event that snaps the behavior from legal to illegal.
They are right that usually each individual piece isn't a crime. But someone can perform 15 acts, each of which, in total isolation, would be legal, but end up in a significant illegal act. As that someone performs more and more of those acts, they move from legal behavior, to probably legal behavior, probably illegal behavior, to probably illegal behavior but with minuscule damages, to illegal behavior with serious damages.
> Now you're back to your original argument, which is that farmers are morally superior to lawyers because they plow the earth.
I don't see that claim anywhere in the message you replied to. I see a claim that he believes that someone should be able to buy seeds and use whatever herbicides one wants with them without a risk of being sued for IP infringements.
That is not an argument about the moral standing of either farmers or lawyers, but an argument about where he believes one of the restrictions on patents should be drawn.
Wrangling with the legal issues enforces consistency in our approach to the laws that govern our society. This approach is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that the base patent laws that are intended to promote innovation are extended logically in their interpretation.
Monsanto has spent incredible amounts of money and effort in pushing genetic engineering forward in order to create more food for the planet. Shutting them out from being able to profit from that effort would seem to be the only notion that is "ridiculous".
The exercise of coming up with a consistent legal approach in dealing with their claims is perfectly legitimate and noble.
> Monsanto has spent incredible amounts of money and effort in pushing genetic engineering forward in order to create more food for the planet.
I think you are misinterpreting Monsanto's mission to a frightening degree. Google posilac for instance.
Monsanto is good at PR, I knew that but that they're able to position themselves as the saviors of the planet is beyond what my cynical imagination could come up with.
And they've made it so that it is annoying to get, in bulk, seed which they cannot claim copyright or patents over.
You get to support that farmers are violating Monsanto's rights by replanting 2G seeds, or you get to claim that Monsanto has moved the world forward by making better plants for everyone--these claims are mutually exclusive if you are optimizing for "The most seeds and plants for everyone."
I for one would support a Constitutional amendment to replace the Supreme Court with a process wherein we simply e-mail jacquesm for his opinion on how we should handle any given situation.
If we take your jest with some seriousness, a judiciary directly accountable to the people is a pretty bad idea. What you generally get is judges who like jacquesm wrap their political beliefs up in just enough pseudo legalese to seem acceptable to the lay public, but are quite wrong on the details (and often say things like the details are unimportant, "splitting legal hairs" etc when confronted with actual legal theory). This is extremely dangerous.
That isn't to say the current system precludes those people either (Earl Warren for example) because it is still a political process but it is more resistant.
That being said, I think that SCOTUS would be better served in cases of patents and sci/tech in general by using the process they currently use to handle important cases like the water disputes between Kansas and Nebraska being argued presently. SCOTUS appoints a special "master" to work on behalf of them to figure out the core issues and educate them. I could see someone like a Richard Posner being an excellent master for patent and SciTech internet related cases.
Splitting hairs is how you actionably say "such patents are ridiculous." You see if you split enough of these hairs, the judiciary says, "Wait, there is no way this can ever be resolved, it is fundamentally broken." and they toss it out. If folks can only find one or two exceptions, well maybe it is a reasonable principle after all.
The issues around Monsanto that get people fired up are more around their enforcement of their seed patents and the wide reach they've got on the seed industry as a result.
Monsanto has systematically worked to destroy access to seeding machines (which take mature crop and harvest the seeds from them) to prevent anyone from using standard farming techniques to build mature seeds. This in effect forces the average soybean farmer to buy ALL his seeds from Monsanto, because they control the supply to seeds.
Additionally, there's a presumption that anyone using non-Monsanto seeds is using a 2G seed that infringes their patent. Farmers are basically bullied away from approaching another source for their seeds.
Lastly, Monsanto is only able to effectively enforce these patents in the US. Soybean farmers throughout the rest of the world regularly use confirmed 2G seeds and their governments don't side with Monsanto. As a result, US farmers are forced to pay the cost of higher seed prices due to the "IP theft" going on in the rest of the world.
hkarthik probably meant "seed cleaning equipment" which is quite different from a combine.
> Monsanto already licenses the technology to anyone you might buy seeds from.
No, that would be false. In fact, they go a step farther and claim that if your neighbor has Monsanto seeds and it drifts into your plots, you need to pay them. Instead of a time honored "you contaminated my land - pay me" we get the reverse complete with bully lawyers.
> I believe Canada was the first location for the successful test of the validity of the patent.
> hkarthik probably meant "seed cleaning equipment" which is quite different from a combine.
That had crossed my mind, but he was quite explicit about the machine that does the harvesting of the seeds. It is not very common for farmers to clean their own seeds anyway, even predating these patent issues. Monsanto has been so successful with this because it has no real impact on most farms.
> No, that would be false.
I mean you are not going to be buying GMO seed from your neighbour, but any business in the business of producing seeds will have the technology available. Monsanto is not the only vendor of RR products.
The question I have after reading the article is - when all purchasable soybean seeds on the market end up being composed of seeds that originated from Monsanto's genetically modified stock (apparently they already mostly are in grain silos), how is anyone going to be able to purchase and grow soybeans without infringing on Monsanto's patent portfolio?
when all purchasable soybean seeds on the market
end up being composed of seeds that originated
from Monsanto's genetically modified stock
This is very unlikely to happen. People are careful to keep track of seed varieties. And as long as there are many people who don't want to grow GM soybeans then non-Monsanto seeds will even stay relatively cheap.
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.
This reminds me a of a line by Trigg in the classic UK comedy Only Fools and Horses (Trigg is a road sweeper for context).
In this classic scene, Trigger claims that he's had his road sweeper's broom for 20 years. But then he adds that the broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.
"How can it be the same bloody broom then?" asks Sid the café owner. Trigger produces a picture of him and his broom and asks: "what more proof do you need?"
A few non obvious issues, G1 seeds are really G20-G50 in that they are several generations after the initial modification. So Monsanto sells GX seeds which produce GX+1 seeds which is the useful part and are supposed to be sold to make soy products, except they want to prevent a single specific use that of creating full plants that produce GX+2 seeds.
Note: GX+1 seeds need to be able to make millions of copy's of there initial DNA sequence to be come seeds so it's a really arbitrary cutoff in that they can multiply millions but not billions of times. Which would happen if the GX plants where left alone.
Hopefully this case eventually involves the Ship of Thessus. Given that the DNA in the G1 seeds undergoes repair, it's quite likely that the original G1 seeds no longer actually contain the original molecules. Also when the seed cells split their DNA some of the original DNA stays with the first cell and some with the second. Given these fundamental questions of identity it's hard to say what is the G1 seed and what is the G2 seed.
I wonder if this algorithm would still present biases given the fact that large cities tend to vote differently from less densely populated areas. My hypothesis is that this algorithm would favor city voters over rural voters, for the following reasons:
1. Successfully gerrymandering in favor of one party generally involves stuffing the other party's voters into one district, while splitting your party's voters into multiple districts.
2. The proposed algorithm favors straight-line divisions through regions such that about half the population of the region is on each side of the division.
3. Thus, chances are, the straight lines will run through the middles of cities, cutting cities into multiple districts.
I'd be interested to see someone test this out--it's likely that my hypothesis is wrong, but it also seems pretty likely to me that there will be at least some urban/rural bias, one way or another.
The reason for setting up a DMCA takedown policy is precisely so that the site doesn't have to deal with copyright infringement: by doing a fairly minimal task of responding to takedown notices, the site operator gets freedom from liability for pretty much any related copyright infringement lawsuit (which otherwise could cost a lot of time and money).
It's pretty easy to set yourself up with such a policy, and anyone running a site that includes user-provided content should have one. EFF used to run a startup boot camp that went through all the steps of how to do it, and if they still offer it I would recommend it.
The reason I'm wondering is that the Copyright Office does require you to provide an email address for your designated DMCA agent, and I'd like to know how they got around that.
(The requirement for registering an agent, by the way, is 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(2).)
Interesting--there is an email address listed. Wonder what happens if you email your notification there? Presumably, if you do, you are in compliance with the statute, regardless of the no-email policy, so they would have to do the takedown.
When I had to fill out all my job paperwork for my new job, I used pdfpen on my iPad for everything, and it looks like it was written by a toddler in crayon.
It was an offer letter, not an application; and was sent to me on a Friday, and needed to be returned the same day (and I didn't have access to a printer).
It doesn't sound like he was filling out an application. It sounds like he had the job and was just filling out HR paperwork for benefits and taxes and such.
tl;dr: Use \A and \z rather than ^ and $ in regexps, because the latter two match newlines in the middle of strings, whereas the former strictly only match the beginning and end of strings.
I thought this was common knowledge, but it's a good reminder for anyone who doesn't know.
I have no ruby knowledge of any kind. Do you mean this is common knowledge in the relevant field?
The regular expressions I _am_ familiar with would work as expected and usually need a special modifier/flag to match over multiple lines. So - I learned something new.
