Every time we get one of these issues about IP I kind of feel like we are doing something very stupid.

The whole legal process surrounding IP, the laws, the patent offices, layers of locals laws, international agreements, weird precedences. The enormous legal costs involved in anything IP (especially patents). Having to relate everything to printing copies in a press or inventing something mechanical. It's all broken.

I don't think we can tweak our way into a better system. Copyright isn't the same thing in a world where "copy" is no longer a real thing. The public interest when it comes to patents is not the same in a world where inventions are organisms and software as it is in a world where inventions are mechanical machines. The rate of patentable innovation is completely different. The line between invention and discovery (crucial to the concept of patentable invention) is much blurrier than it was. The moral implications are not the same. The economic implications are not the same.

The legal system governing patents has several big features which suggest it is completely broken. Patent trolls using the ungodly cost of litigation together with single use limited liability entities (another concept that is now broken) to use the legal system without being bound by it. Patent wars between huge companies and the subsequent ceasefires. There is no way any sane person would have purposely have designed a system this way.

It's like having a police force that just shoots everyone when they arrive at a scene. Then some criminals find out that they can walk into a bank wearing armor and threaten to call the police. Obviously something's not working right.

Even in the domain where patents are have the strongest case: drugs & medical procedures, the patent system is very warped. The problem is that it is expensive to test a new drug in a ways that proves it is safe to the authorities. So, a guaranteed monopoly is necessary to justify the expense. But, that research is not invention and it isn't the thing which is patentable. If we want to reward companies for demonstrating the effectiveness and safety of a drug and getting it approved for use, lets do that directly.

I really think we need to blank slate intellectual property laws. It's one of those things that seem both impossible and inevitable.

IP policy is an intrinsic and harmful byproduct of capitalism, like inequality. IP exists to legally protect a competitive advantage in the marketplace, making it indispensable to anyone in the marketplace. every capitalist is incentivized to act in defense of current IP laws, because their continued success in the marketplace is based on their control of IP. considering the people defending IP policy are largely the ones controlling the lion's share of capital, they correspondingly have a much greater amount of power to dictate IP policy in every arena, from the legal to the legislative.

this is an intractable problem. information is just an abstract form of capital. at the heart of it, success in capitalism is about consolidating as much capital as you can. it follows that information will be consolidated as much as possible, and this problem will only get worse as time goes on.

since we all need money to fulfill our basic and higher-level needs, our economic systems directly drive our collective behavior. since capitalism is based on competition, this means our collective behavior is always going to be driven towards individualism. as we have seen, when we have problems that require behaviors not incentivized by the economy, such as cooperation - climate change, biodiversity, etc - we instantly hit a brick wall and find that cooperation is impossible. we see companies continuing to steamroll ahead with oil drilling and such in the face of huge disasters, not because anyone is evil, but because everyone is doing their job.

i don't know what the solution is, and i am not advocating any other economic paradigm over capitalism. but i think we need to take several steps back and ask ourselves if our best heuristic for determining the behavior of human societies is: "move capital around as efficiently as possible." and i'm not even touching the fact that laissez-faire capitalism optimizes for inequality.

chicago and austrian school commenters: come at me, bro.

There are already lots of "open source" seeds. Most of the cheap seeds on the seed rack at the dollar store are "open source" for instance.

Seeds like Black Seed Simpson Lettuce. Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans.

These seeds are not F1 hybrids as most seeds used by commercial operations are. Instead, they are open pollinated meaning you can harvest the seed and have the same plant next year. Anyone could buy a pack of these seeds and start selecting away. So, the concept is not new, not novel....there is a large bank of seeds "in the public domain" already.

The problem in my opinion is the ability to patent things like "a red carrot". But this problem is hardly limited to seeds.

No offense to the original poster but this article kind of rambled and the actual point was vaguely made and hard to pick out. I think it involved a guy in a hemp shirt with a Carl Marx poster at some point. I'm sure he is a cool guy but probably unlikely to be taken seriously by most farmers and seed breeders. The real answer in my opinion (at least for commercial growers)? A farmers collective. Stop being the seed companies victim and start owning your own genetics. As a group they could do this and I believe they should.

The OSSI page explains that "If [public domain seeds] were available only in a traditional commons, people could obtain them, breed with them, and restrict their use through patents or licenses", whereas seeds with the OSSI pledge cannot.

It's analogous to how public domain software is not Free Software (by Richard Stallman's definition). Maybe it would be more technically accurate to name the OSSI something like the Free Germplasm Project.

Ah, Ok. Yes, I suppose one could get open pollinated seeds currently available, select and hybridize them, and patent the resulting product (which probably is more or less what seed companies have been doing). So this attempts to stop that practice on seeds from the OSSI breeders.

It would have been nice had they been more clear about this in the article and talked a bit less about what color of shirts the people were wearing.

How can the company patent the broccoli when they received their seeds from the professor, an uninvolved 3rd party (To the point that their lawyers are asking him for more samples when they made their patent claims).

Isn't this de-facto prior art?

From the same paragraph: "They needed the Oregon State plants for comparison to prove their invention was, in patent language, truly “novel.”"

They're trying to show that their plants are different from the Oregon State plants.

Rubbish american legal system

Isn't a monopoly in seeds also quite dangerous, as the whole population might be eradicated by one single disease?

Edit: Also the fact that you cannot actually fight the system without participating in said system is totally perverse. So in order to open source a seed you have to first patent it and then waive the patent you just created? Sounds like a huge overhead just to justify the legal system.

Couldn't they just publish their data online?

Set up a definitive record of breeding history (maybe something like they do with horse genealogy), then describe the traits of each seed, DNA profile, etc. This could at least serve as evidence of prior art. It might take a few years to build such a database, but every little bit of evidence will help defend against overly broad patents.

NB. I am not a lawyer...

GNU/Lettuce.

This has always interested me, how can someone claim to invent a specific seed based on a characteristics that could very well become realised naturally.

Hopefully the OSSI becomes a leading force to help get higher yield seeds into farmer's hands. As we already know, the world's population is growing and the it's arable land isn't getting any larger.

An interesting hack is described near the end:

  Jim Myers began breeding a plant he now calls “The O.P.,”
  which stands for “open-pollinated.” Until then, his broccoli
  were either hybrids or inbreds, created by a process of
  narrowing the genetics until one select mother is bred with
  one select father to create a single, most desirable combination
  of genes. The O.P., by contrast, is the result of a
  horticultural orgy. Myers began with twenty-three different
  broccoli hybrids and inbreds, including some of the lines
  behind the exserted-head trait. He let insects cross-pollinate
  them en masse, and the resulting plants were crossed at random
  again—and again, and again, four generations in a row. He then
  sent germplasm to farmers around the country, had them grow it
  in their fields, and send back the seed they collected. Over
  the winter, Myers bred it in another greenhouse orgy, then
  sent it back to farmers. For six years, he repeated this process.

  The broccoli evolved in two ways simultaneously. The
  back-and-forth of the breeding scrambled the plants’ genetics,
  making the germplasm wildly diverse. It also let the environment
  whittle away at individual genes. For instance, plants without
  pest resistance produced less seed or simply died, reducing
  their presence in the gene pool. When it was hot, plants that
  could tolerate heat produced more seed, increasing their
  presence. Survival of the fittest.

  In the seventh year, Myers sent most of the seed back to the
  farmers—just gave it to them, without licenses, royalties or
  restrictions. The idea was that each farmer would adapt that
  dynamic gene pool to his or her farm’s particular climate and
  conditions, selecting the best plants every year to refine the
  population. In other words, they could breed it themselves. In
  time, each would end up with his or her own perfect broccoli.

  The beauty of the O.P. is that rather than challenge the
  intellectual-property system, it inherently rejects the concept
  of ownership. It contains many of the desirable genetics of
  Myers’s commercial broccoli lines, but in a package that is
  designed to be shared, not owned. Because it is open-pollinated,
  not a hybrid, its seeds can be saved by any farmer. And because
  it is genetically diverse, it would be difficult to pin down
  with a patent. Even if someone did claim to own it, because each
  new seedling is a little different, that claim would be all but
  impossible to enforce. In this case, the plant’s natural
  instinct to mate, multiply, change—to evolve—isn’t an impediment
  at all. Rather, it is a central reason why people would want to
  grow it in the first place.

I like that it is the exact opposite of their other strategy. Instead of going down a road where "the tools of the master are repurposed in a way that... actively subverts the master's hegemony", the plants are bred in a way that makes the tools of the master obsolete and useless.

Is there an equivalent anti-patent strategy for software?

> Is there an equivalent anti-patent strategy for software?

I suppose you could do some sort of genetic algorithm or other machine learning to produce an algorithm that itself can't be patented because it's the result of a random process, but then someone could claim that genetic algorithms or machine learning is patented.

I think the best we have are the anti-patenting techniques of the Apache licenses or the good ol' GPL.

I've had this idea before. This guy used genetic algorithms to create a fast approximation of square root (http://multigrad.blogspot.com/2014/04/math-evolution-and-dir...). You may be able to use a similar method to generate code at run time and get around patents. You can't patent the output of an algorithm.

I found the article pretty rewarding, here's my attempt at a summary:

The article is about the OSSI (Open Source Seed Initiative).

Since 1985 it's possible to get "utility patents" for plants. This allows you to claim that something like "easily harvestable broccoli" (say a breed with a specific shaped head) is your unique invention. Plant breeders are worried about the same chilling effects we see in software patents. Breeding something like "really red carrots" could get you sued. This is not an academic concern as thousands of patents are being filed.

Big companies are (naturally) treating the patent-ability of plant breeds and traits as a "land rush", an opportunity to lock away whatever profitable ideas they can. This is viewed as an encroachment on the commons by old-school plant breeders, who note that many of the specific things being patented have been worked on for decades (or maybe, thousands of years if you look at the big picture) in basically an open-source manner. They value seed freedom in the same way as a hacker might view freedom of code and ideas.

Plant breeding experts and enthusiasts have been working for years to oppose this trend, or at least carve out some reasonable exceptions, but things just seem to be getting worse.

Major "industrial" crops like corn and soybeans are pretty much locked down, covered by 500 and 250 patents respectively in 1999 (more today). Today, it would be hard to grow those in a commercially viable way without using someone's IP.

Now there is more interest in vegetables by multinationals. This seems much worse to OSSI because it covers a wider variety of "things people eat" and encroaches on non-industrial breeders and growers more.

Tired of lobbying and "slow change", the group in the article wanted to create a movement like the free software movement, but for seeds. However, there's no legal basis for copyleft in this area because patents are different from copyright. Copyright is automatic, allowing easy "copylefting". To apply this scheme to patents, they would have to apply for patents for each of their breeds or traits before they can dictate licensing terms, which would be onerous, expensive and still legally dubious.

The group couldn't find a way to construct a copyleft system for seeds, but they're still intent on creating and popularizing a movement. They're putting non-enforceable "shrink wrap" honesty licenses on their seed packets. Another avenue to preserve seed freedom is to focus on breeding "open pollinated" varieties (e.g. sexually reproduced), since these preserve genetic diversity and are harder to lock down with IP laws.

At the risk of going into boring and meta (it's completely fair to downvote me for this), this is not a fair comment. If you don't want to read the article because it's long, don't. But, don't come in and complain that the article is long. Just ignore it. The people who do want to read it will. Let them comment about it.

Reading the article is the price of admission sometimes that price is high and sometimes it's low.

This is like commenting "Chemistry is boring" on an article about chemistry. Not interested. No problem. Go discuss something you are interested in or submit an article you do want to discuss.

It is, if you read it as a request for a summary. What, is there none? Is it all description?

If there is a 37-minute film about cryptography that is linked, would you expect everyone to watch it? Or would a request for a summary from someone who has, be fair?

The sentence I quoted ("From a distance, Jim Myers looks like an ordinary farmer. Most autumn mornings, he stands thigh-deep in a field of wet broccoli, beheading each plant with a single, sure swipe of his harvest knife. But under his waders are office clothes, and on his wrist is an oversized digital watch with a push-button calculator on its face") can be summarized as "Jim Myers studies broccolis" (or whatever the summary is.)

It is like commenting "is there an abstract somewhere?" when linked to a 300 page PDF that for some reason has none.

The "tl;dr" is stop being lazy and read the article, or skip it. No one else can read and comprehend for you on your behalf.

But that's plainly false, as I showed an example of. Type any work of fiction into Wikipedia and you will see a summary by someone who has done just that.