> the story they want to tell is that they were sued for cultivating seeds that accidentally wound up on their fields, but the facts established at trial were that, however the seeds ended up there, the farmers deliberately exploited the patented system.
I don't understand the distinction you're making. "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them. Do you mean that it's illegal to buy Roundup if you haven't already bought the seeds that go with it, or something?
Edit: I think maybe you're saying that Monsanto has patented the very act of applying Roundup to a Roundup-Ready crop. So not only are the seeds and pesticides patented, but the method of applying one to the other is patented. If that's the case, that's a dumb patent that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
It's not illegal to purchase and bulk-spray Round-up to an incompatible crop. It's just stupid. It is expensive and it will kill the plants.
The lawsuit alleged that the farmer's behavior was so stupid that he must have known his crop was Roundup-Ready.
That's not consistent with accidental pollination. It suggests that he deliberately cultivated or obtained seeds that were Roundup-Ready and that he knew his crop would survive the pesticide. Bulk-spraying Roundup establishes awareness and intent.
The farmer was unable to provide a convincing explanation for why he would attempt to poison his entire crop, year after year, so the court concluded he was engaged in deliberate patent evasion.
It's worse than that: the farmer knew there was slight contamination of his field with Roundup Ready plants. So, he deliberately sprayed the field with Roundup to kill all the others, applying artificial selection to concentrate the trace of contamination. I believe he repeated this more than once. So, he was guilty of engaging in deliberate production of not trace, but concentrated patented seeds.
Hang on. He didn't plant the patented seeds; he planted his own seeds, which were then pollinated by his neighbour's Roundup-Ready plants. I can't see anything wrong with that.
So now he has a crop that consists of hybrids. These hybrids are all different; each plant is a different mixture of <farmer's variety> with Roundup-Ready. Some of those plants will have resistance to glyphosate. Then he sprays with Roundup; the resistant plants survive, the rest die. Now he has a harvest of seeds that are resistant to glyphosate, but in all other respects are a mixture. These seeds are not the ones sold by Bayer/Monsanto.
So is it the strain that is patented, or the gene?
If it's the strain that gets the patent, then the farmer-next-door isn't growing your patented strain, so he's in the clear. So it must be the gene, right?
If it's the gene, then it seems unreasonable to yell "patent violation" if you're spreading patented pollen over the entire midwest. You must either sell seeds that don't make (viable) pollen, or you have to accept that the farmer had his crop involuntarily infected with your IP because of your negligence.
I thought the GMO manufacturers bred sterility into their strains for just that reason.
Meanwhile, the farmer-next-door now has a grain-store full of resistant hybrid seeds, that won't (on the whole) fare as well as Roundup-Ready, because they're all different strains. That is, having the resistant gene isn't the whole story; you need a strain that is resistant AND grows well AND is consistent. That means an F1 hybrid, and you don't get that by just crossing strains; you have to get into selecting and cloning the favourable strain, growing that strain into a crop, and letting it cross with its (identical) siblings to make true-bred seeds.
You can't use selective breeding to escape a patent.
You can argue that patents of all sorts are invalid and shouldn't be granted. That's a totally coherent argument and not one you'll get a lot of pushback about on HN. I don't agree, but I don't, like, viscerally disagree.
The problem is we have a lot of weird special pleading arguments about this particular patent. The most popular argument, which I think we've done a pretty good job debunking here, is that Monsanto will sue you for unwittingly cultivating their seeds, as if they'll just sort of pop out of the woodwork saying "gotcha! you didn't realize it but you owe us one million dollars!". That never happens. You got in trouble with Monsanto if you quite wittingly applied their patented system, full stop.
Similarly, it's kind of a weird special pleading argument to say that a Monsanto seed can blow onto your property, and then, like, it's just something growing in the ground, man, you can't outlaw a plant, and two or three growth cycles later you somehow have a Roundup Ready seed that is unencumbered by patents. A good rule of thumb is that if you've filled in the "???" in the Underpants Gnome construction --- here: "1. seeds blow onto field, 2. ???, 3. profit", something has gone wrong with your logic. The direct conclusion of your logic is that these farmers could in fact go into business competing with Monsanto selling GM crops. Obviously: no.
The farmer new that some of the seeds in the field were the "roundup ready" ones that had blown over from the other field. Most of them were normal crops that would die when applied with roundup. He then applied the entire field with roundup, killing most of the crop in the field, with the explicit goal of saving all the remaining seeds so that he could plant them next year without paying monsanto.
No, the distinction was that the fact that they used RoundUp (which would have killed the crops they claimed to have planted) suggests a motive. The farmers claimed that the seeds had just drifted into their field by chance, Monsanto claimed they'd deliberately planted them. The fact that they sprayed the resulting crop with a herbicide that would have killed their own crop seriously calls the farmer's account into question. How would they possibly have known that enough seed had just blown over the road that it was safe to spray?
>Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them.
Roundup is a herbicide. It kills normal plants. Monsanto sells seeds that were genetically modified to resist it. It doesn't make any sense to spray it on natural plants.
My understanding of OP is that the farmer used Roundup on his crops knowing full well that his "natural" and "non patented" crops will be killed by Roundup, which the patented plants are naturally immune to by design.
I don't understand the distinction you're making. "cultivating seeds" and "deliberately exploiting the patented system" mean the same thing in this case. Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them. Do you mean that it's illegal to buy Roundup if you haven't already bought the seeds that go with it, or something?
Edit: I think maybe you're saying that Monsanto has patented the very act of applying Roundup to a Roundup-Ready crop. So not only are the seeds and pesticides patented, but the method of applying one to the other is patented. If that's the case, that's a dumb patent that shouldn't be allowed to exist.