“It amazes me that the argument that this is a huge worry comes from the extreme left…”

This isn’t very good reasoning. The worry might be valid, the person who is bringing it to you might be a moderate leftist, or even not on the left at all but saying this paints anyone who is worried about the issue as unreasonable in a prejudicial way.

I will accept that patents are finite in time, and that this keeps monsanto from some of the endgames that I have suggested (I know more about the patent system now than when I first learned about monsanto in ‘98 or earlier). However, I seem to remember monsanto having pressured countries to increase their patent term lengths(even if unsuccessfully). It’s not often that it comes up, but there is a movement to make patents the same “forever minus a day” that copyrights are, with the problems that come along with that which you have mentioned. (Part of this comes from treating patents as intellectual property, and trying to make intellectual property one single concept with a single set of laws). I don’t have the WIPO transcripts for this on hand either though, so feel free to ignore me here if you are absolutely concerned about credibility.

Re: DV82XL: #26

It is for this very reason that the “IP” debates *cannot* end well — because the large business interests have an interest in making it turn out a way that is against the democratic interest of the people. I have to wonder how they will scrub our history books of the massive amounts of protest against copyrights and patents the way we are currently treating them, but in the end we will forget that ‘the right to read’ fears were ever even a worry, and that alternatives were even possible.

* The the part about ‘they are only a company and the market can undermine them’ is a separate issue. However, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread there are reasons that the market isn’t going to doing so. GM is a good example — GM is getting bailed out by the public so that it can continue to be the Big Bad Corporation. Nothing has changed, except the whole system is on the verge of collapse.

        DV82XL said:

There are issues with IP rights and GM cultivars, but then there are issues with IP rights in any number of domains these days, and it is obvious that there is going to have to be a major overhaul of both the law and attitudes before this issue is settled. However this debate, and questions over the basic idea of GM crops, and the technology itself must be kept separate. Unfortunately I constantly see the topics confounded in these conversations making it very difficult to come to any consensus.

Indeed, there are some big issues that need to be tackled in the legal sense when it comes to protecting the rights of the companies who own the technology and the proprietary genetic changes while preventing any one entity from gaining too much control or restricting the use of things down the road.

It is my opinion that this should be handled through patent law and not through the more broad copyright laws especially those covered under the DMCA. It bothers me a lot to see designs and technologies being protected by general copyright law. These areas of intellectual property are better addressed through the patent system. Patents have a limited lifespan intended to allow enough time for a party to reap the benefits of their innovation without forever limiting it to them. Patents also are limited in scope. They may give the holder the rights to produce something, but they don’t stop others from using after-market modifications or reusing it, as long as they are not themselves producing a copy of the protected material.

The problem is that there’s no real precedent for GM crops and the caselaw is designed for other things and is being wedged into this area. What we need is legislation that creates a framework to address the IP concerns, keeping it consistent with existing law but eliminating the lack of consensus.

The problem is that any proposed legislation that comes before any legislatures in the world is going to be a lightning rod for special interests who want to load it with restrictions. If it is not loaded with ridiculous restrictions it’ll be seen as being pandering to the horrible big corporations.

        George Carty said:

Unless they can get the government to grant them a coercive monopoly.

It surprises me that with General Motors, one of the poster-boys for the Big Bad Corporation That Controls Everything, on the ropes, that anyone can still subscribe to this belief.

There are issues with IP rights and GM cultivars, but then there are issues with IP rights in any number of domains these days, and it is obvious that there is going to have to be a major overhaul of both the law and attitudes before this issue is settled. However this debate, and questions over the basic idea of GM crops, and the technology itself must be kept separate. Unfortunately I constantly see the topics confounded in these conversations making it very difficult to come to any consensus.

        George Carty said:

Unless they can get the government to grant them a coercive monopoly.

I suppose, although that can only get them so far given that there are other countries where this will not apply. The other thing that makes it difficult is that the public can eventually get fed up with it and in a democracy get new leaders.

It amazes me that the argument that this is a huge worry comes from the extreme left who demand more regulation and management. Historically, the only times that a true coercive monopoly has managed to exist for any period of time have been in fully planned and managed economies.

In the Soviet Union, there was basically only one manufacturer of automobiles. There were different makes: Volga, Pobeda, Zaporozhets that were produced by different design and manufacturing sites, but their production and availability was all under the Soviet industries administration. Not only did they control car production, but the government had strict controls on imports, so you couldn’t even get a forign car without going through them.

Of course it was the same way with everything else besides cars. Food came from a government ministry, fuel did etc etc. Of course we all know what this lead to – cars that fall apart and bread lines when demand for food was high. You could not shop around anyway because prices were set by a central authority.

In this kind of economy, not only was there a monopoly, but even if someone wanted to compete, they could not. If a group of people decided that they wanted to try to start a small manufacturing operation with the hopes of growing it, then the government would only allow very small production of anything, and if you were successful enough to start to actually get buyers and expand, then you’d need permits that would lead to your operation being absorbed by the government.

Of course, China was like this too for a long time.

        drbuzz0 said:

Companies of any size are entirely dependent on consumers’ willingness to buy their products.

Unless they can get the government to grant them a coercive monopoly.

        themusicgod1 said:

@George: what makes you think they haven’t?

Not exactly an objective source of information.

Companies of any size are entirely dependent on consumers willingness to buy their products. As soon as that changes or another company, however large or small, offers a better product the company fails. You don’t need to go to war with a corporation to take it down, you just need to do what they do better.

No, they’re not about controlling the world food supply or diminishing standards or killing the poor or taking over rule of law etc etc. They are a company that makes a product. They produce a product through research and development which farmers willingly buy because it is beneficial to them. They want to continue to improve and expand their product line to get more to buy them.

They’re not the only game in town either. There are many seed producers. Some of them use genetic modification, some use entirely cross breeding techniques. Additionally, farmers can breed their own seeds, if they really want to. There are government and university researchers.

Yes, Montesso has become the biggest player in the beet market because they produce something that nobody else does and nobody else can equal, but they’re not likely to ever corner the market for corn seeds or soy seeds, because those markets already have many companies making genetically improved crops.

Anyway, the patents don’t last forever.

Monsanto isn’t about poison, it’s about controlling the world’s food supply. Swapping terminator crops for non-GM crops, swapping “owned” strains of crops(roundup-ready canola in the Schmeiser case in Canada) for “natural” ones, and in general pressuring governments to respect their “ownership” of the very stuff of live that keeps humanity alive.

I’m not a fan of Monsanto, but I don’t see how this would work unless Monsanto bribed governments to pass laws which banned non-GM crops and forced the destruction of their seeds.

Otherwise, Monsanto price gouging on GM crops would simply trigger a return to non-GM crops, wouldn’t it?

Where does the idea come from that big companies are always going to make something harmful? I keep hearing over and over that it’s all about profit and therefore the big corporations want to create poison. What? Kill your customers isn’t good buisiness sense.-CybgrnX

Monsanto isn’t about poison, it’s about controlling the world’s food supply. Swapping terminator crops for non-GM crops, swapping “owned” strains of crops(roundup-ready canola in the Schmeiser case in Canada) for “natural” ones, and in general pressuring governments to respect their “ownership” of the very stuff of live that keeps humanity alive. I do not want to have to license the right to my own life, liberty and happiness from a monopoly corporate entity. It’s bad enough we have to pay tax to a government — imagine if Monsanto had a monopoly of the global food supply? There would be two sets of rules of law — one for those in control of Monsanto’s power apparatus, and those outside of this circle of power. In the case of the latter, the former can simply cut off the food supply, and sue you if you try to grow your own food. That is a possible future and one that they seem to be working towards.

Second, even if they were about poison it can make business sense. Poison the poor to produce products aimed primarily at the rich. The market just doesn’t care about the poor; the peasant farmer in rural india, the factory worker in china, the crazy guys without teeth surviving off of food scraps left in the dumpsters in the ghettos of north america, the women and children in abidjan — if a corporation can somehow find a way to “externalize” their poisons that they would otherwise have to pay to reprocess into something useful into these groups, they will. It’s not about killing your customers when they aren’t your customers and will never be able to afford to be.

And third, even if it *was* bad business sense…who said that large corporations were rational? They are bureaucracies — anyone who’s ever worked in a large bureaucratic institution will know that they often do things for no redeemable value whatsoever, either because of the sheer stupidity or internal political and power struggles.

To give three recent examples of reasons why we shouldn’t trust large corporations, to pull from a hat,
1) lowering of health and safety standards for canadian products through the SPP initiatives, directly resulting in a listeriosis “crisis”, lowering competition, and decreasing food and product safety through products containing lead and other unhealthy materials being allowed into the marketplace at all.
2) the very existence of bank/auto company bailouts — if that isn’t theft on the biggest scale in history I don’t know what is.
3) “bank bailout recipients spent bailout money to give working people a rougher deal.
The examples are *endless*. For a reliable source of this stuff, I’d suggest Sean Kennedy’s NewsReal — there’s a lot of crazy you’ll have to shift through to get to it but it’s pretty much all there.

In general, we distrust concentrations of power in corporate hands because in order to do great harm you need to
a) have an organizational structure that allows the efficient allocation of resources (check)
b) have an organizational structure that is ordered to allow benefits to accrue to a minority at the expense of everone else / one that ignores externalities / actively serves to undermine / feed on its surroundings. (check)
Once you have these two things, of which the modern corporation is a clear example, there is nothing stopping great harm from taking place, except for *maybe* market pressure.

To return to the main topic, I’d like to point out that the inconsistent ban in the main article is ridiculous and

@drbuzz0 #12:
Same logic would seem to apply to the British Empire, Genghis Kahn and the Soviet Union — yet you wouldn’t want to be the one person standing as their armies moved on towards your location. Maintaining power throughout the ages is pretty difficult — but centralized power should be frightening, nevertheless.

If you don’t like what the newspapers say buy one or start your own.