Ok so it seems you are concerned about an organic farmer whose crops are contaminated by Monsanto's seed, who then loses his 'organic' label and gets sued by Monsanto.
Here's a hypothetical question: Imagine that Monsanto only sued the farmer if his crop was contaminated AND he used Monsanto's Roundup-Ready herbicide (or a generic equivalent that specifically targets Monsanto crops like Roundup does). Also imagine that he could keep the 'organic' label by showing that there was only a small amount of contamination. In this scenario would you still consider Monsanto to be evil?
There is nothing about using Roundup that would make one culpable. Roundup Ready mainly means "able to tolerate tons of glyphosphate without dying." Glyphosphate works in use cases apart from Roundup ready crops. I used it to kill poison ivy in my backyard at one point.
Sadly, you and I are not "Roundup Ready" and don't have any mods to our endocrine system to help us cope with eating it and the additives (surfactants) used to bind it to crops.
Ok, but the question remains: If Monsanto's policy was to only sue farmers who have contaminated crops AND who use a herbicide designed to kill everything except Monsanto crops, would you consider Monsanto to be evil?
First, you're begging the question. Second, I think you should reconsider words like "evil" to describe the type of work Monsanto does. You're choosing a pretty emotional word about a mostly banal patent litigation.
I get a lot of flack for this in political circles but I think that IP law is a field which has more importance for the future regarding individual rights than, say, abortion. We are talking about IP-based monopolies here over crops, medical tests, and the like, and the scope of these patents is just unprecedented. I don't know what to call those who want such power other than evil.
The Supreme Court has been pretty good recently on these issues, for example overturning patents on recommended results in medical tests (and therefore allowing competing ways of measuring the same thing), greatly restricting uses of secondary patents in medicines and the like. Now they are considering two cases:
1) When you patent a self-replicating technology, is the patent exhausted when the product self-replicates, particularly when the purpose of the patented object is self-replication (patented soybean seeds have the purpose of producing more soybean seeds and that's what they are sold for the purpose of doing). I suppose this would have some implications regarding home rose gardens and the ability to legally share patented clones but aside from emerging transgenic crops the implications are not very heavy.
2) Can a part of the human genome in the abstract be patented? Who owns your genes? I think this must necessarily follow that these can't be patented from Prometheus v. Mayo (decided last year, no IANAL) because that case held that you couldn't patent what the result of a drug test meant. But if this can't be patented, then surely patents on crops are exhausted after first sale.
Could someone link to a lawsuit in which a farmer's crop was contaminated with Monsanto seed without his knowledge and then sued by Monsanto? I hear this enough that I must insist on a citation.
I doubt they can. This is the most commonly cited case [0] but it's pretty clear from the facts that the farmer was not an innocent, unwitting victim. This claim is made in bad faith so often as to make any discussion about Monsanto almost pointless from the start.
Wow, that Wikipedia article's history is interesting.
What I can see from a cursory look at the court documents is that the court dismissed on grounds of irrelevance his claim that he neither used roundup nor any similar herbicide on the crop in question.
There is room for debate here, but one certainly does not have to be ignorant to regard Monsanto as "evil".