"And the smell of rot fills the country.“ (Chapter 35)
This passage had a profound impact on me when I first read it in high school. Only later did I discover that such atrocities still happen regularly today.
Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is.
Any government functionary that tries to prevent a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. Any lawyer that tries to prevent a farmer from selling food, is doing evil. Any court that enjoins a farmer from selling safe food, is doing evil. If the farmer is found to have violated some IP claim, then the proper remedy is monetary damages after the fact, not enjoined before the fact.
> French company
Enough said. This US admin will nuke that agreement instantly. If it was a fellow American company, let it pass.
once you plant a tree to grow fruit you should be allowed to keep harvesting that tree until its natural end. if there is an exclusive contract then the contract must not be allowed to be terminated before that end unless the grower is free to sell on the open market after termination.
anything else would allow patent owners to hold growers hostage ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶.̶
The farmer sought termination and violated the contract.
It doesn't, to my knowledge. It requires they not sell them.
Can it have value for the purposes of a donation if you can't sell it? Would taking a tax deduction trigger a patent liability?
I've read this a couple of times in these comments. However, this "in a while" is meaningless. A quick search suggests plant patents are 20 years from filing of patent. That's not as bad as I was thinking after hearing about the copyright nonsense of 95 years of publication or 120 years from creation depending. That'd be multiple generations of farmers rather than just one.
In general, crop plants don't propagate well in the wild. The whole point of breeding a crop plant is to remove their chemical defenses (to make them edible) and to make them produce lots of edible parts. This is usually the direct opposite of what plants need to survive in the wild.
This is a real thing that happens. There have been major court cases about it, like this one from Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
By "wild propagation" I meant outside of the original controlled planting.
Propagating to another farm leaves the controlled area and now it's spreading in the wild.
"The impact of their wild propagation should be studied first, not unleashed upon the local ecosystem."
So by "wild propagation" you meant farm-to-farm propagation? And by "local ecosystem" you meant "farmers' fields"? And you accuse others of redefining words.
This is a side effect of many clonal varieties of selective-bred crops. It's why they have to be grafted.
Edit: also, Monsanto has never actually used their non-replicating seeds. This is a common trope in the greenie hippie community that "Monsanto wants to own your food forever".
If you make patents illegal, no one will breed new stuff. How does that help?
All that will do is cause people to grow the old stuff, which they still can, even if the patent exists.
Do you get what I mean? Adding a patent does not reduce anything, it only adds a new option.
There would still be public, industry-group and philanthropic research. But yes, probably much less.
I know that occasionally philanthropic research works out, but generally I find that people are motivated by profit.
This common sense statement should be true, but is wholly ignorant of the lawsuits farmers deal with from seed suppliers
Eh, I'd say it's fair to give them a short window of patent protection. Say 20 years, akin to pharmaceuticals.
The only exception should be if the protected variety has a monopoly. Then it immediately loses patent protection.
Also, all patents are monopoly. That is actually what a patent provides, it provides a limited government sanctioned monopoly over the invention.
There are certainly tons of cases where modern developments might be actually essentially to life or extend life like with medication, medical devices, temperature control, moves to modern electric technologies versus combustion to reduce pollution, etc. How do we incentivize new medication development, something way more lifesaving than nectarine varietals, without some period of exclusivity? At least there, twenty years from now, the solutions will be more accessible versus never developed.
Living beings are not inanimate objects that are manually made out of raw materials. They are not human-made. They reproduce and humans only create the environment for this to happen. You cannot invent a living being. You can invent a modification in the genome and thereby create a new breed, but that should not grant you the right to have a monopoly on the reproduction of those living beings.
Plus, it's seems false to paint this orchard as just an environment humans created where they reproduced. It's a place where the farmer very specifically reproduced them, not just the conditions.
Like all other laws. I don't see how this is relevant.
> It's a place where the farmer very specifically reproduced them, not just the conditions.
Sorry to be so blunt, but the farmer is neither fucking peaches nor giving birth to them. Living beings self reproduce. Humans sometimes put a lot of work into creating the perfect conditions for that to happen, but that is irrelevant to the point. When I smash rocks together to create a tool I and only I created that. When I plant seeds for them to grow into fruits which contain many more seeds I did not create the new seeds on my own. That does not make my work any less valuable but it does change the nature of the action. The first scenario should be allowed to be restricted to the inventor for a limited time. The second scenario should not be restricted. The act of reproduction of life should never be seen as anyone's property.
Which, in and of itself, may be fine for you, but I find it to be the absolute least useful comments on HN.
I'd say it is in the end an ethics issue. Sure, the tone may be offputting, but... I think there is value in having people around who actually hold beliefs and aren't as quickly willing to put their beliefs aside. Society as a whole benefits from a corrective to ultra-progressives - even if what the progressives want is a good thing (which, to be clear, it almost always is!), move too fast and you end up losing the masses along the way.
I don't know about you, but people who hyperbolically label stuff "evil" without providing justification seems like exactly the type of person who would flip-flop depending on whether it's politically expedient for them or not (eg. preaching fiscal responsibility when the opposition is in power, but then being fiscally profligate when they're in power).
> Fresno County Superior Court Judge Jon Skiles in May ruled that Giumarra’s breach of contract claim can go forward, saying that the agreement between Giumarra and Mora is valid whether there is a patent for the fruit or not.
> “The sublicense agreement does not expressly state that its validity is dependent on the existence or issuance of a patent for the fruit,” he wrote.
And during the last 100 years, the yields for many types of plants have grown several _times_ because of modern selective breeding methods. Here's a nice graph for cereals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Index-of-cereal-productio...
So you want to go back hundreds of years and force people to live in hunger with frequent famines?
There are plenty of patent-free crops. So just plant them. And the patents eventually expire.
Sadly, there are theories that this is precisely something that is desired as population control of groups that are "less desirable". It's usually the same groups that say AIDS was designed for the same purpose.
if you can't throw it away you need to be allowed to sell it.
the point here is sustainable production. the EU is implementing laws around that. if you produce more than what you can sell, then you need to reduce production and stop wasting resources.
It's really not. Exhibit A: this farmer giving away his nectarines. Hell, maybe he can write off the loss as a donation.
There’s an interesting question of if the distributor misrepresented the deal to Mora as he claims, but from the summary it appears nothing related to that is recorded that the court finds legally relevant.
john_strinlai•1h ago
>[...] Fruit patents are becoming more common
this is unbelievably stupid. no company should have rights or patents over a variety of food.
jMyles•1h ago
This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.
bluerooibos•57m ago
Monsanto begs to differ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
jMyles•50m ago
All this silliness to create a huge complicated regime to pretend that these things are "property" in the same sense as your underwear is just so obviously childish, incoherent, and inconsistent with reality.
It's just a really elaborate gown purported to be worn by the manifestly naked emperor.
gruez•45m ago
So you're against any sort of intellectual property?
PunchyHamster•36m ago
bluerooibos•59m ago
Wait until you hear about Monsanto/Bayer - a quick Google of "monsanto food patents" brings up the highlights.
gruez•53m ago
The cases seem fairly reasonable, given how the defendents were basically engaging in selective breeding to copy the traits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases#Patent_li...
bpodgursky•57m ago
They made a new varietal. Nobody is saying he can't plant any of the standard heirloom Nectarines. The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it.
Honestly, how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? This is how it has worked for half a century and mild gripes aside, the quality of the produce in stores is WAY WAY BETTER than it was before (seriously, what is the last time you ate a Red Delicious apple?)
Have like... some awareness of the large functioning important system you are mindlessly breaking with throwaway comments.
armchairhacker•39m ago
How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public?
Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them
cyberax•28m ago
Patents are used to enforce the rules so that competitors don't cheat.
Selective breeding requires sometimes _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work. This is not a good fit for academia and even worse fit for government programs.
yulker•33m ago
dylan604•15m ago
werdnapk•50m ago
If the products are being bred from tax funded programs, then yes, anybody should have access to the new breeds, but if it's privately funded, then why should it be available for everyone? Without the protection, there isn't much incentive to invest time into developing better foods.
PunchyHamster•38m ago
You'd have better luck "stealing" it with some wire cutters and cutting some shoots off the trees
basilikum•23m ago
For sure, no one is arguing for stealing fruits here. However while you can steal physical fruits, you cannot steal genes.
> then why should it be available for everyone?
Why should it not be? You seem to view the right to breed a variety of some species that you created as some natural right and default. It is not. What you are arguing for here is the state going after people for creating the environment for plants to reproduce, which is a natural right.
triceratops•17m ago
(I don't know fruit growing well so maybe that's not true)
odie5533•33m ago
Capital to create new plants has to come from somewhere: public tax funding, grower-funded pools, or patent licensing. We do a mix of all three.
HDThoreaun•22m ago