It's not a scandal, just a fact, that in most of farm country, if you get blowover you do your best to hide it so that Monsanto won't come after you. If you're a seedsaver whose crop tests positive for GMOs at the elevator, you go home and remix your sample until you test clean. What you don't do - and what desperately needs doing - is get together with other farmers to bring a class action against Monsanto, because you don't have any money and you know Monsanto will do its best to destroy you, and there's no guarantee that you'll win (the test case in Canada lost). Midwestern legislators need to show a lot more cojones on this issue, but even the major environmental organizations don't want to touch GMOs as an issue because they're afraid of all the bad press they'd get.

If a monsanto claim of infringement can possibly hold against a farmer whose land has been invaded by a nearby Monsanto crop field,

then how could Monsanto possibly defend against charges of criminal trespass, vandalism, theft of water resources, and similar actionable offenses? The victim farmer didn't plant it, and Monsanto seems bent on taking credit for it...

-- phil servita

I don't like it either. But even if this patent invalidation attempt succeeds, it won't stop Monsanto's practice of suing farmers, since (I presume) they have a lot more seed patents.

60 Minutes or some other program had a piece on this a year or two ago. If I recall correctly, Monsanto actually pays off farmers and seed store owners to narc on possible violators, and this has created a feeling of suspicion throughout farm country. If Farmer Smith has been buying a patented Monsanto seed for years and this year he doesn't, Farmer Jones and Mr. Amway Operator can collect big bucks if they drive by Farmer Smith's field, see that he is growing the same crops as last year, and drop a dime to tell Monsanto about it.

I think the seed-blowing-onto-someone's-land-as-trespass that someone mentioned in a letter is a non-starter, just as I would not have a case for trespass against Ron Popeil if one of his Veg-o-matic's fell out of a passing car onto my front yard. But it could be a good defense to patent infringement. If a farmer who didn't pay for Monsanto's seed was sued because some of its corn ended up growing on his land, and if a nearby farmer was paying for it, then there was no intentional patent infringement. The fact that someone else (even Mother Nature) put the patented invention into the innocent farmer's product should be a very strong--maybe even complete--defense. I'd be surprised (though not shocked) if Monsanto sued a farmer with a small amount of patented corn, or whatever crop, growing amongst the rest of his crops. That said, the RIAA sued grandmothers who didn't even use the web after the Napster ruling came out in their favor, so perhaps there is no underestimating the greed of some organizations.

Anyway, I think as the patent laws are set up now, there is little one can do to stop the general practice of Monsanto suing farmers, outside of farmers refusing to use Monsanto's products. But if it is more profitable to use them than not, well, the market will dictate that farmers will use them. So invalidating four of them may be more of Don Quixote than anything.

But I agree, the whole practice smells a bit rotten.

Paying attention to these Midwestern legislative moves in the Midwest is important, because they are proof of grass-roots discontent with Monsanto's corporate activities by farmers, as opposed to environmental activists or anti-GMO crusaders.

Right Andrew, because there are no environmentalists or anti-GMO crusaders in the Midwest. I know enough of both around here to put lie to that bit of coastal arrogance.

Crumley, I think you are misreading me. My point was not that there are no environmentalists or anti-GMO crusaders in the midwest. Obviously, there are.

But environmentalist and anti-GMO crusaders make a whole lot of noise all over the place, and you don't always see legislative change as a result. My point was that the enactment of legislation aimed at one specific company's activities in Indiana and South Dakota is significant, because of what it reveals about broad-based, grass roots discontent.