121–130 of 144 posts
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Would you bar a contract for the productivity of a tree for a given period of time, with a clause dictating how excess produce is to be disposed of?
yes, there should be no excess that needs to be disposed. if you produce excess you should reduce production.
Works "great".
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yes, there should be no excess that needs to be disposed. if you produce excess you should reduce production.
Notably, US healthcare is run with this mindset. Perfect planning for exactly the capacity that we need. Works "great".
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I appreciate when somebody speaks with conviction about their beliefs.
What's the purpose of communication? Is it to convince, or to preach to the choir/your side? If it's the former, I doubt summarily labeling everything "evil" or "a human right" is going to change any minds. If it's the latter, what's even the point? Is it to make you feel good about yourself or make yourself look good in front of your activist friends?
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> how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public? Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them
Well, yes. That's what is happening. The contest is called "market" and "the people" reward competitors by paying them. Patents are used to enforce the rules so that competitors don't cheat. Selective breeding requires sometimes _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work. This is not a good fit for academia and even worse fit for government programs.
Sounds like it's ripe for AI automation. Need less of this nonsense about restricting access because "effort should be rewarded with exclusivity".
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What I don’t understand is, _how_ it doesn’t depend on a patent right. How do you license something that doesn’t depend on a licensable right? If it isn’t a patent right, exactly _what_ is he purchasing a license to? If it’s purely an agreement of exclusivity to Giumarra, it can’t be called a “sub license” and the consequence is just a breach of contract (which is what it sounds like). But in that case I’m sure there…
it could be seeds, rootstalk, cash, loans a future purchase guarantee. There is basically an endless list of reasons the contract could have been initially attractive for the farmer. As you say, it mostly comes down to what the parties agreed to about exiting the contract.
It's fine to say "there was an agreement that the farmer would grant exclusive rights to the produce of the trees, in exchange for seeds, rootstalk or cash", but that's not a license. I don't understand that aspect of this at all. The articles consistently talk about a "license", not other consideration such as the aforementioned seeds or a guaranteed purchase.
The only "property" that could conceivably be licensed in such a manner is a patent - other forms of IP such as copyright or trademark wouldn't enter into it. And any other property doesn't make sense because... well... the only property here is the farm and the trees, which are the undisputed property of the farmer.
It just feels like a very loose usage of the word "license".
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Essentially all commercial apple trees are grafted and don't reproduce true to seed. Been this way for almost a century now.
Them doing it for a certain amount of time does not make it any less egregious. I'm not sure if you're just stating fact or wanting to use it as a rebuttal. I hope the former.
You plant a seed, you have very little idea of whether the apples will be good. This isn't a modern evil, this is simply how apples are.
Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food. Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is. Any government functionar…
> ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding And during the last 100 years, the yields for many types of plants have grown several _times_ because of modern selective breeding methods. Here's a nice graph for cereals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Index-of-cereal-productio... So you want to go back hundreds of years and force peopl…
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I can go for a month, probably longer, without, say, the internet. I could also go a month without food, maybe, but there are people who can't. Food is different because it is essential to life.
The food that is patented isn't essential to life, though. Essentially all of humanity has lived all of it's lifetimes without this modern varietal of nectarines just fine. There are certainly tons of cases where modern developments might be actually essentially to life or extend life like with medication, medical devices, temperature control, moves to modern electric technologies versus combustion to reduce pollutio…
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I can go for a month, probably longer, without, say, the internet. I could also go a month without food, maybe, but there are people who can't. Food is different because it is essential to life.
This relates in no way to the availability of food, which in the US at least is high enough that starvation is the preserve of the terminally ill, anorexic/bulimic, addicted and indigent, rather than people who can't find calories to eat. This is almost entirely an economic issue that would be a lot easier to discuss without the incessant and repetitive emotional comments.