The Supreme Court mulls a patent over a 'product of life'
In an Op-Ed article for The Times on Tuesday, George Kimbrell and Debbie Barker of the Center for Food Safety present a forceful argument against patents on seeds or any other "product of life." The issue arises because the Supreme Court is considering the case of a farmer sued by Monsanto for infringement because he replanted soybean seeds that the chemical company had patented.
At the oral arguments Tuesday, the justices acknowledged that they had never before considered a patent on a live, "self-replicating" invention. (It's the first of two on the docket this year involving patents related to genes; the other involves a patent over human genetic information linked to breast cancer.)
Two questions dominated the discussion, which didn't go well for the farmer, Vernon Hugh Bowman. The first was what, exactly, was the patented product that Monsanto was selling. And the second was what incentive companies would have to develop new seeds -- or vaccines or other easily replicable products -- if the patent protection was exhausted when the first generation of the product was sold.
The case, Bowman vs. Monsanto, has potentially enormous implications for not just agriculture, but any field where copying is essential to the use of a patented product. Think biotech and software, for example.
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