
Linux for Lettuce - mr_tyzic
http://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2014/05/linux-lettuce
======
netcan
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.

~~~
amagumori
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.

------
jqm
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.

~~~
zodiac
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.

~~~
jqm
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.

------
rurounijones
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?

~~~
tormeh
But one is a person and the other is a person. Some are more equal than
others. Get it? ;)

~~~
andrzejsz
Rubbish american legal system

------
wigginus
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.

------
adwf
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...

------
martiuk
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.

------
decode
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?

~~~
jordigh
> 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.

~~~
Houshalter
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...](http://multigrad.blogspot.com/2014/04/math-evolution-
and-dirty-tricks.html)). 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.

------
BostX
TL;DR :-(

~~~
logicallee
Fair comment, I just came to glance at the comments. According to the top of
the article, it's a 37-minute read but it has to be longer. I started to
scroll down with the pagedown key to get to conclusions, etc, but after
holding down the key for 2-3 seconds I gave up on even scrolling to the
bottom. The article is 7414 words.

It starts: "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. "

The writing style is certainly engrossing, but we just don't all have time for
such a length of reading.

Tl;dr anyone?

~~~
netcan
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.

~~~
logicallee
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.

