alt Hacker NewsPatents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food.
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.
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Oh, and there is a special place in hell reserved for anyone involved in designing food crops that can’t reproduce.
In general, invention of new things is something humanity's been tackling for quite awhile. Why would this apply specifically to food versus, well, everything?
Breeding new crop varieties is relatively scientific and sophisticated work, like any other advances in technology and products. If you couldn't parent your work, there wouldn't be much incentive to do the work. America has had plant patents since 1930, there is nothing new about this.
Just a general thought on your comment style. Summarily declaring something "evil" means that you're not really interested in hearing any other comments on the topic, and that additional data or analysis of the issue will have no effect on your opinion.
Which, in and of itself, may be fine for you, but I find it to be the absolute least useful comments on HN.
only thing I can say is that patents, unlike copyrights, seem to continue to expire in less than a lifetime (20 years).
> ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding
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.
> Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil
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.
You are perfectly free to keep selling what we've been eating. No one is forcing people to plant the new stuff.
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.
Despite what everyone is assuming, this case doesn't depend on patents. The farmer entered into an agreement with another company and they're locked in a legal battle about that agreement.
> 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.