Who cares what Schmeiser did to the plants GROWING ON HIS OWN LAND? Why must he explain his reasons to anyone for dealing with a predatory invader?
Analogy: someone accidentally drops a backpack containing DVDs in my front yard. Am I now licensed to make and sell copies of the content on those DVDs?
Anyway, your argument is with the Canadian Supreme Court, not with Monsanto.
That's a deliberately flawed analogy. You don't copy the DVDs. The DVDs copy themselves, using your land and resources to do so.
This is more like somebody "accidentally" setting up a DVD pressing factory on your property. You quietly let the factory owner continue pressing DVDs (using your electricity no less) and sell the DVDs yourself when they're ready. It's all on your property, the factory owner is trespassing and I don't see how the factory owner can claim a right to the pressed DVDs. (Don't build automated self-reproducing things that you want to claim patents on, even when they're stealing other people's resources.)
I'm not so sure why people are trying to make analogies between copyright law pertaining to software and patent law pertaining to genetic material. All of these analogies seem so strained that they lose all their power.
You patent a specially engineered cow to taste good with your specially engineered steak sauce. One day your specially engineered steers jump my fence and rape my cows. Upon realizing this, I begin buying your special steak sauce from you and eating my new cows with it.
When your analogy is not about "patent law pertaining to genetic material", you wash out the absurdity.
Steers, per se, lack the (ahem, equipment) capacity to impregnate cows. I think you mean your bull jumps my fence.
Also I believe it could be argued that a specially engineered bull would rise to the level of a "dangerous animal" (such as keeping an elephant or a lion) for purposes of trespass and liability. The owner of a genetically engineered, patent-encumbered, bull would know and have prior knowledge about the unique danger involved in having such an animal escape and be held especially liable.
The difference is that DVDs do not make copies of themselves. Schmeiser simply used the seeds that ended up on his land (as far as I know, I don't know all the details of the case). Wouldn't the analogy then be, should you be able to watch the DVDs that ended up in your front yard?
>Schmeiser simply used the seeds that ended up on his land (as far as I know, I don't know all the details of the case).
It only takes a few minutes to find out the details of the case. He didn't just accidentally get some Monsanto seeds mixed in with his own -- instead, he noticed some Roundup-resistant plants growing on his land, collected seeds from them, planted them in a test field, and then separated the Roundup-resistant from the non-Roundup-resistant strains by... well, spraying 'em with Roundup. In other words, he went to some effort to deliberately separate and reproduce the specific Roundup-resistant strain which happened to wind up on his land.
I don't see how that's different from what I'm saying. The seeds did accidentally get mixed into his own. Whatever steps he took afterwards to isolate them, plant them, etc. is just using the seeds.
Analogy: someone accidentally drops a backpack containing DVDs in my front yard. Am I now licensed to make and sell copies of the content on those DVDs?
Anyway, your argument is with the Canadian Supreme Court, not with Monsanto.