Speaking of Monsanto and Gene Patents...

And right on cue, like the catastrophe of the old comedy, comes some fresh news about Monsanto and its gene patents:

Monsanto Co., facing antitrust probes into its genetically modified seeds, may benefit from previous court rulings in which intellectual property rights trumped competition concerns, antitrust lawyers say.

Got that? Intellectual monopolies, as well as being inherently bad, are also a "Get Out of Jail Card" for companies breaking anti-trust law. Broken, or what? (Via @schestowitz.)

Open Science vs. Closed Companies

Here are some interesting thoughts on open science and how it relates to those working within companies:

Just as secrecy in academia only makes sense within the existing reward structure, secrecy in industry could be at least partly offset by policy decisions that recognize the gains in efficiency that collaboration can bring. I've heard multiple times from multiple sources that industry may close itself off from the rest of the world, but within a company, the teamwork ethic is amazing. Clearly, the value of co-operation is recognized. Why shouldn't that also work for (larger and larger) groups of companies? What you lose by not being the only company to know something from which profit can be made (call it X) is offset by the fact that you might never have learned X without the collaboration -- and in the meantime, the world gets X that much faster.

It seems clear, though, that such top-down decisions are more likely to be made in academia, and perhaps the nonprofit sector, than in profit-driven industry -- at least until there are enough concrete examples of success to tip the perceived balance of risk. If I'm -- if we Open Foo types are -- right, it's actually riskier to compete than to cooperate in the long term. Better to own a share of X sooner than to delay any return on your investment in the hope of owning X outright later. This is especially true when the resources required to try to own X could be used to get you shares in multiple other projects at the same time.

Sharing should not be seen as a problem but as a solution.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

There's Nothing New Under the Sun

One of the many sad aspects of Sun's disappearance into the maw of Oracle is that many will see this as “proof” that its strategy of building on open source was a failure. But as Simon Phipps, Sun's former Chief Open Source Officer, rightly says in his valedictory blog post:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Science vs. Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a key section from the new Royal Society report "The scientific century: securing our future prosperity":

Science thrives on openness - the free exchange of idea, knowledge and data. Changes to the way that information is shared are already accelerating developments in certain disciplines and creating new approaches to research. This openness can create a tension with the need to capture and exploit intellectual property. But it also presents an opportunity for scientific collaboration and innovation.

Well, maybe it creates a tension because intellectual monopolies are fundamentally antithetical to science and knowledge. Maybe the scientific community needs to realise this, and ought to refuse to compromise on its basic tenets of sharing knowledge for the greater good, not least because the shift from analogue to digital is magnifying their importance. Maybe the report should have been less pusillanimous in this respect. And maybe, because it wasn't, it will be yet another case of words, words, words...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Oh, Tell Me the Truth about Patents

One of the pernicious effects of the highly-successful campaign to re-brand intellectual monopolies as "intellectual property" is the abiding belief that whatever the local faults, globally the system is working well. Well, maybe not:

For those with a principled, libertarian view of property rights, it is obvious that patent and copyright laws are unjust and should be completely abolished. Total abolition is, however, exceedingly unlikely at present. Further, most people favor IP for less principled, utilitarian reasons. They take a wealth-maximization approach to policy making. They favor patent and copyright law because they believe that it generates net wealth — that the value of the innovation stimulated by IP law is significantly greater than the costs of these laws.

What is striking is that this myth is widely believed even though the IP proponents can adduce no evidence in favor of this hypothesis. There are literally no studies clearly showing any net gains from IP. If anything, it appears that the patent system, for example, imposes a gigantic net cost on the economy (approximately $31 billion a year, in my estimate). In any case, even those who support IP on cost-benefit grounds have to acknowledge the costs of the system, and they should not oppose changes to IP law that significantly reduce these costs, so long as the change does not drastically reduce the innovation gains that IP purportedly stimulates. In other words, according to the reasoning of IP advocates, if weakening patent strength reduces costs more than it reduces gains, this results in a net gain.

Well, $31 billion: that's a high price to pay for something we don't need... (Via Tim Bray.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Criminalise Exotic Pets, not File Sharing

As I've noted before, in ACTA governments and the content industries are pushing the Big Lie that swapping copyrighted materials is linked to organised crime. Here's some actual research in developing countries refuting that:

they’ve found no connections between piracy and drug trafficking, prostitution, organized crime, or terrorism. There are little overlaps but nothing systematic. This is despite industry claims that piracy funds organized crime and terrorism.

And if the authorities really cared about stopping organised crime's ancillary activities, here's one it would be tackling first:

Countries across south-east Asia are being systematically drained of wildlife to meet a booming demand for exotic pets in Europe and Japan and traditional medicine in China – posing a greater threat to many species than habitat loss or global warming.

More than 35 million animals were legally exported from the region over the past decade, official figures show, and hundreds of millions more could have been taken illegally. Almost half of those traded were seahorses and more than 17 million were reptiles. About 1 million birds and 400,000 mammals were traded, along with 18 million pieces of coral.

The situation is so serious that experts have invented a new term – empty forest syndrome – to describe the gaping holes in biodiversity left behind.

"There's lots of forest where there are just no big animals left," says Chris Shepherd of Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network. "There are some forests where you don't even hear birds."

Seahorses, butterflies, turtles, lizards, snakes, macaques, birds and corals are among the most common species exported from countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Much of the business is controlled by criminal gangs, Shepherd says, and many of the animals end up in Europe as pets. The rarer the species, the greater the demand and the higher the price. Collectors will happily pay several thousand pounds for a single live turtle.

But of course, since we're talking about mere ecosystems here, not something sacred like intellectual monopolies, it's pretty low on governments's priorities....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

EU's Gallo Report: Rubbish Recycled

I've noted several times an increasingly popular trope of the intellectual monopolists: since counterfeiting is often linked with organised crime, and because counterfeiting and copyright infringement are vaguely similar, it follows as surely as night follows day that copyright infringement is linked with organised crime.

Well, that apology of an argument is now being recycled in the draft of the Gallo Report [.pdf], "on enhancing the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market," from the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament:

there are proven connections between various forms of organised crime and IPR infringements, in particular counterfeiting and piracy

Well, maybe between organised crime and counterfeiting, but I challenge anyone to provide evidence that it's linked to infringements of copyright ("piracy").

This is not the only example of a lazy and totally biased reuse of old arguments employed by the content companies. Earlier in the document we find a similar parroting of the inaccurate statements put about by industries dependent on intellectual monopolies:

violations of intellectual property rights (IPR), defined as any violation of any IPR, such as copyright, trade marks, designs or patents, constitute a genuine threat not only to consumer health and safety but also to our economies and societies

*Counterfeiting* can certainly be a threat to consumer health and safety, and needs to be combated vigorously, but the idea that copyright infringement might be is simply risible, and it's an insult to our intelligence even to suggest it.

innovation and creativity have considerable added value for the European economy and, taking account of the economic context, they should be preserved and developed

Well, yes, but they are quite separate from the enforcement of intellectual monopolies, I'm afraid.

the phenomenon of on-line piracy has assumed very alarming proportions, particularly for the creative content industries, and whereas the existing legal framework has proven incapable of effectively protecting rights-holders on the Internet and the balance between all the interests at stake, including those of consumers

There is no balance whatsoever: the original 14-year term of copyright is now life plus 70 years in many jurisdictions: the consumers are *never* considered in any of this. This claim is totally one-sided in favour of the monopolists.

The report even stoops to the level of advocating brainwashing the young, when it

Stresses the need to educate young people to enable them to understand what is at stake in intellectual property and to identify clearly what is legal and what is not, by means of targeted public awareness campaigns, particularly against on-line piracy

What it means, of course, is that it wants to bully them into accepting the lazy, arrogant, monopolists' view that they are entitled to their old business models, that nobody is allowed to innovate around digital content, and that the little people like you and me should learn to shut up.

All-in-all, this is one of the most disgraceful pieces of work I have ever seen from the European Parliament: a true blot on the otherwise laudable record it has of defending the rights of the European public that elected it. If it wants to retain its credibility with the latter it should reject this load of nonsense and start again.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

SABIP Finally Enters 21st Century

It looks like at least one government department, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP), is starting to get a clue about the digital economy, and the fact that constantly harping on about *online* file-sharing misses the bigger picture:

Today sees the publication of the first comprehensive review of currently available national and international research into consumers’ attitudes and behaviours to obtaining and sharing digital content offline. Much of this activity infringes current copyright law in the UK.

Because what do they find?

# Estimates indicate that between 7-16% of the UK population buy discs (DVDs, CDs, & video games) which infringe copyright. Very little is known about other forms of physical peer-to-peer file sharing (e.g. hard drive swapping) and the few estimates that exist vary greatly.

# Demographics for consumers who acquire offline/hard copies which infringe copyright appear to be different from those that engage in online copyright infringement: they are often older, with dependent(s), and are more likely to belong to lower socio-economic groups - ie. they are more ‘ordinary’ than the predominantly younger, well educated, technologically-savvy group who infringe copyright online.

# The evidence is mixed as to whether consuming content through infringement substitutes or complements legal consumption. For example, while the music industry points to falling sales, some evidence suggests that consuming music illegally does not substitute legal consumption but that both types of consumption may sit alongside each other.

# Initial evidence indicates that online downloading and file sharing is substituting offline counterfeit sales. Anecdotally some suppliers suggest that the market for counterfeit content is declining - this is corroborated by falling seizures of counterfeit discs.

They suggest:

* The sharing of digital content offline needs to be looked at through a new lens. It has been predominantly studied using criminology or social psychology. But these perspectives tend to carry value judgements about what is considered right or wrong which implicitly shape the research. This means that other factors, eg, economic criteria, have rarely been considered. Industry and government surveys suggest that these additional factors are very important to any consideration of copyright infringement.

* There is little research that looks at the effect of ignorance of IP law. Copyright law is complex, and difficult for the average consumer to fully understand (where consumers are aware it exists at all). The default position in previous criminology-based research is that people know that they are breaking the law and make a choice to do so, but this is not empirically proven.

Who would have thought that economic criteria might have played a role in people's decisions to share copyright materials offline? Similarly, who would have thought that the fact that in recent decades copyright has been framed solely for the benefit of content owners, and not content users, means that it is user-hostile to the point of opacity, and that "ordinary" people make no attempt to navigate its thickets?

Let's hope this report is the first in many that shows some realism on the part of not just SABIP, but the UK government.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Monsoft or Microsanto?

I and others (notably Roy Schestowitz) have noted the interesting similarities between Microsoft and Monsanto at various levels; but a major new story from the Associated Press makes the parallels even more evident.

For example:

One contract gave an independent seed company deep discounts if the company ensured that Monsanto's products would make up 70 percent of its total corn seed inventory. In its 2004 lawsuit, Syngenta called the discounts part of Monsanto's "scorched earth campaign" to keep Syngenta's new traits out of the market.

This is identical to the approach adopted by Microsoft in offering discounts to PC manufacturers that only offered its products.

Monsanto has followed Microsoft in placing increasing emphasis on patents:

Monsanto was only a niche player in the seed business just 12 years ago. It rose to the top thanks to innovation by its scientists and aggressive use of patent law by its attorneys.

First came the science, when Monsanto in 1996 introduced the world's first commercial strain of genetically engineered soybeans. The Roundup Ready plants were resistant to the herbicide, allowing farmers to spray Roundup whenever they wanted rather than wait until the soybeans had grown enough to withstand the chemical.

The company soon released other genetically altered crops, such as corn plants that produced a natural pesticide to ward off bugs. While Monsanto had blockbuster products, it didn't yet have a big foothold in a seed industry made up of hundreds of companies that supplied farmers.

That's where the legal innovations came in, as Monsanto became among the first to widely patent its genes and gain the right to strictly control how they were used. That control let it spread its technology through licensing agreements, while shaping the marketplace around them.

Monsanto also blocks the use of "open source" genetically-modified organisms:

Back in the 1970s, public universities developed new traits for corn and soybean seeds that made them grow hardy and resist pests. Small seed companies got the traits cheaply and could blend them to breed superior crops without restriction. But the agreements give Monsanto control over mixing multiple biotech traits into crops.

The restrictions even apply to taxpayer-funded researchers.

Roger Boerma, a research professor at the University of Georgia, is developing specialized strains of soybeans that grow well in southeastern states, but his current research is tangled up in such restrictions from Monsanto and its competitors.

"It's made one level of our life incredibly challenging and difficult," Boerma said.

The rules also can restrict research. Boerma halted research on a line of new soybean plants that contain a trait from a Monsanto competitor when he learned that the trait was ineffective unless it could be mixed with Monsanto's Roundup Ready gene.

The result is yet another monoculture:

"We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable," said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades.

The key difference here, of course, is that this is no metaphor, but a *real* monoculture, with all the dangers that this implies.

Fortunately, things seem to be evolving for Monsanto just as they did for Microsoft, with a major anti-trust investigation in the offing:

Monsanto's business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws.

Amazingly, David Boies, the lawyer that led the attack on Microsoft during that investigation, is also invovled: he is representing Du Pont, one of Monsanto's rivals concerned about the latter's monopoly power.

Let's just hope that Monsanto becomes the subject of a full anti-trust action, and that the result is more effective than that applied to Microsoft. After all, we're not talking about software here, but the world's food supply, and monopolies - both intellectual and otherwise - are simply morally indefensible when billions of lives are stake.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Preserving Patents Before the Planet

I don't think this needs much comment:

The Chamber's Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) has been front and center in this debate, and our position is clear: if governments are serious about addressing climate change, and all agree that new technologies are a vital part of the answer, then IP laws and rights need to be protected in any Copenhagen agreement. Indeed, in our view, a Copenhagen Summit with NO mention of IP at all is a successful conclusion. Current international laws and norms are working, and need to be preserved.

Got that? Stuff the environment, we've got to protect the *important* things in life, like intellectual monopolies...

Is EU Parroting the ACTA Lie?

I've written several times about the trick that ACTA uses to blur the distinction between large-scale, criminal counterfeiting, and domestic, personal copyright infringement. Sadly, the EU seems to be following the same script:

In Europe, counterfeiting and piracy have a dramatic and damaging effect on business and they have the potential to become even more problematical due to the recent economic downturn and the growing range of fake products being sold. While luxury goods, fashion, music and film products have traditionally been targeted, today counterfeiting and piracy affect a wider variety of mass consumption goods such as foodstuffs, cosmetics, hygiene products, spare parts for cars, toys and various types of technical or electrical equipment. In particular, the increase in fake medicinesis of growing concern.

IPR infringements cause widespread economic harm and an increasing number of counterfeit products now pose a real threat to consumer health and safety. It is therefore in the interest of stakeholders and consumers alike to have a responsive enforcement system which is robust, proportionate and fair.

Notice how "piracy", which presumably includes file-sharing, morphs into counterfeit products that "pose a real threat to consumer health and safety" - not to mention that weasel word "proportionate"?

As La Quadrature du Net points out:

The communication calls for so-called “voluntary agreements” between rights holders and ISPs in order to fight filesharing, without prescribing the practical measures that could be implemented through such agreements. We know however that the Commission has held several meetings in the past few months with representatives of both rights holders and ISPs. Also, it seems that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreeement (ACTA) currently negotiated at the international level could provide a basis for the strategy the Commission calls for in the communication.

All-in-all, worrying stuff that we need to keep a close eye on.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Intellectual Monopolists Scorn the Blind

The ever-vigilant James Love pointed to this fascinating submission from the UK's venerable Royal National Institute of the Blind [.pdf]:

Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is the UK's leading charity offering information, support and advice to over two million people with sight loss.

...

Even in the wealthiest markets, less than 5 percent of published books are made accessible in formats that reading disabled people can use. In many developing countries the figure drops to one per cent. We call this a “book famine”.

...

In theory, reading disabled people can read any book a non-reading disabled person can read, thanks to so-called “accessible formats”. These formats do not change the content of a work, but rather the way in which the person reading accesses it. They include large print audio, Daisy [http://www.daisy.org/] and braille.

...

What is certain is that the market has failed to deliver anything like this ideal scenario, despite the best efforts over many years of campaigning organisations like ours and of some examples of “best practice” from publishers.

The five per cent figure shows that mainstream publishing, which quite legitimately exists to make a profit, has not catered for the “reading disabled market” to any significant extent. To hope therefore that “market forces” will resolve the book famine problem would be to put faith in a tried and thus far failed model.

This, then, is the reality of "modern" copyright: it fails to serve huge numbers of people, many of whom are already suffering from discrimination in other ways.

Given this situation, various organisations are not unreasonably trying to facilitate access to copyrighted works for those who are visually disabled with a new WIPO treaty that would define basic rights for this group. Who could object to such a humanitarian cause? Well, the publishers, of course.

The RNIB explores the reasons for this:

At WIPO, broadly speaking, rights holders and some Member States maintain that the solution can be found entirely through the use of voluntary, cooperative measures between rights holders and members of the reading disabled community. They therefore “back” the WIPO Stakeholder Platform and oppose the treaty proposal.

...

A worldly observer might therefore suggest that opposition to a treaty stems more from a dislike of any kind of exception to copyright, than from a conviction that a treaty would not help increase access to books.

A worldly observer might indeed - just as an equally wordly observer might suggest that publishers don't give a damn about those with visual impairments, and are prepared to fight tooth nail against even the blind to preserve their intellectual monopolies.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Time to Abolish the Olympics?

This is incredible:

An American author and broadcaster claims Canadian border officials questioned her about whether she would discuss the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games at a speaking engagement Wednesday evening in Vancouver.

...

They began to search her notes and computers and those of her two colleagues, Ms. Goodman alleged. They then photographed the journalist and gave her a stipulation to leave the country by Friday night. They were delayed over an hour.

Now, there are two explanations for this. One, is that free speech no longer exists in Canada, which is news to me. I can't imagine even the most zealous border official was really trying *in principle* to restrict Ms Goodman's general right to talk about anything.

The other possibility, seems much more likely: that this was another epiphenomenon of the Olympic trademark insanity, whereby ordinary words are suddenly forbidden to lesser mortals - unless they pay.

In other words, it is precisely the privatisation of language that is used as an analogy for the patenting of algorithms - something so manifestly absurd, that no one would ever do it. Except that in the case of anything touching the Holy Olympics, we are already there.

If it's got to the point where border officials are checking people for "prohibited Olympic words" that they may be about to use without permission, perhaps it's time to call a halt to this corporatisation of language by abolishing the Olympics in their present, hypertrophied form. How about going back to basics: a competition in Olympia, for amateurs, with none of the commercial superstructure that has accrued: just pure sport?

Too much to ask? Yes, probably, until the widespread assumption that intellectual monopolies like copyright, patents and trademarks are in some sense *good* for us, despite all evidence to the contrary, is preceived to be the con-trick it really is.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Who Owns Science? The Manchester Manifesto

One of my heroes, Sir John Sulston, has a piece in the Guardian today with the intriguing headline "How science is shackled by intellectual property":

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace. In reality, patents often suppress invention rather than promote it: drugs are "evergreened" when patents are on the verge of running out – companies buy up the patents of potential rivals in order to prevent them being turned into products. Moreover, the prices charged, especially for pharmaceuticals, are often grossly in excess of those required to cover costs and make reasonable profits.

IP rights are beginning to permeate every area of scientific endeavour. Even in universities, science and innovation, which have already been paid for out of the public purse, are privatised and resold to the public via patents acquired by commercial interests. The drive to commercialise science has overtaken not only applied research but also "blue-skies" research, such that even the pure quest for knowledge is subverted by the need for profit.

Great stuff, but this is actually just a teaser for the launch today of something called rather grandly "The Manchester Manifesto" [.pdf], which states the problem as follows:

It is clear that the dominant existing model of innovation, while serving some necessary purposes for the current operation of innovation, also impedes achievement of core scientific goals in a number of ways. In many cases it restricts access to scientific knowledge and products, thereby limiting the public benefits of science; it can restrict the flow of information, thereby inhibiting the progress of science; and it may hinder innovation through the costly and complicated nature of the system. Limited improvements may be achieved through modification of the current IP system, but consideration of alternative models isurgently required.

Unfortunately, after asking the right questions, the answer that the manifesto comes up with is pretty thin gruel:

We call for further research towards achieving more equitable innovation and enabling greater fulfilment of the goals of science as we see them.

Further research?

Modified and alternative models of innovation have the potential to address problems inherent in the current system. An investigation and evaluation of these models is required in order to determine whether they are likely to be more successful in facilitating the goals of science and innovation identified above, and if so how they may be deployed.

Hey, let's not get too radical, eh?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Has Microsoft Got a Job for You...

Since it's Monday morning, I thought I'd start the week gently, with a little humour, courtesy of a Microsoft job ad. After all, who could read the following without laughing?

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mandelson's Madness

The trajectory of the Digital Economy Bill has been extraordinary, constantly experiencing will-he-won't-he moments as successive consultations and comments and rumours have contradicted each other over whether “three strikes and you're out” would be part of the plan. Today, the Bill is finally published, but that particular element now looks almost mild compared to what is apparently coming...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Why SAP is a Sap

There's some interesting turbulence in the blogosphere about the following call from Dr. Vishal Sikka, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SAP:

To ensure the continued role of Java in driving economic growth, we believe it is essential to transition the stewardship of the language and platform into an authentically open body that is not dominated by an individual corporation. Java should be free of any encumbrances to permit fair competition between compatible implementations for the benefit of customers. By preserving the integrity of Java, the IT industry can ensure a vibrant developer community and continued innovation for enterprise software customers. This ensures the continued global economic success brought about through open innovation.

Matt Asay rightly calls him out on this:

Irony, thy name is SAP.

SAP, after all, is hardly the most open-source or open-process friendly company on the planet. Despite early involvement in Eclipse, some interaction with MySQL (MaxDB), and a new commitment to the Apache Software Foundation, SAP remains a firmly proprietary company.

Even Microsoft, which arguably has the most to lose from open source, has consistently and continually experimented with greater open-source involvement.

SAP? Not so much. In large part, SAP hasn't been forced to embrace open source because it hasn't been threatened by it. ERP (enterprise resource planning) is such a complex beast that it has remained largely impervious to open source (with the exception of open-source start-ups like Compiere and Openbravo, to which I'm an adviser).

Now, Dirk Riehle is stepping into the fray:

I don’t think that this is a fair critique. SAP has always provided the source code of its main business applications suite to user-customers as part of a commercial license, and users have always customized SAP’s business suite to their heart’s content. In fact, it is the only way to make it work for their needs.

That may well be the case, but I think it's irrelevant.

The real reason SAP's call is hypocritical is this document [.pdf], essentially a love-letter to software patents, submitted as an amicus curiae brief to the European Patent Office. Software patents are simply incompatible with free software, because they are government-granted monopolies designed to *stop* people sharing stuff. They also prevent hackers from writing new code because they represent an ever-present digital sword of Damocles hanging over them.

SAP simply cannot claim to be a true friend of openness while it also supports software patents in any jurisdiction, in any form - the same applies to other companies, too, I should note. They can share as much code as they like, but until they repudiate software patents - for example, by placing their patent portfolios in the public domain - that's little more than window-dressing.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

No Patents on Seeds...or We're Really Stuffed

Good to see that I'm not a lone voice crying in the wilderness:

The continuing patenting of seeds, conventional plant varieties and animal species leads to far-reaching expropriations of farmers and breeders: farmers are deprived of their rights to save their seeds, and breeders are under strong limitations to use the patented seeds freely for further breeding. The patent holder controlls the sale of the seeds and the planting, decides about the use of herbicides and can even collect royalties at the harvest – up to the finished food product.

Our food security is increasingly dependent on a few transnational chemical and biotechnological companies.

The European Patent Office (EPO) has continuasly broadened the scope of patentability and undermined existing restrictions, in the interest of multinational companies.

Allthough plant varieties and animal species are by law exempt from patentability several hundret patents on genetically modified plants have been granted already. Basis for these decissions is the highly controversial EU Biotech Patents directive and a decission by the EPO's Enlarged Board of Appeal, which ruled in 1999 that in principle such patents could be granted.

Now the European Patent Office again has to deal with a basic question: Patents on conventional plants and animals!

The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO will use a patent on broccoli (EP 1069819) for a fundamental ruling, on whether or not conventional plants are patentable. The broccoli in question was merely diagnosed using marker assisted breeding methods to identify its natural occuring genes. The genes were not modified. All other broccoli plants with similar genes are considered as "technical inventions“ by the patent. Thus even their use for breeding and the plants themselves are monopolised. Through this the provision which prohibits the patenting of "essentially biological proceses" is to be undermined. The EPO has already granted similar patents: e.g.: only recently the company Enza Zaden Beheer received a patents on pathogene resitant lettuce ( EP1179089B1)

Should the Enlarged Board of Appeal uphold the patent, then this decission (case T0083/05) will be binding for all other pending patent applications and even for animals and their offspring.

This exactly parallels the situation with software patents, where the EPO is using every trick in the book to approve them; except it's even worse.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

More Evil from the Intellectual Monopolies Mob

One of the best windows into the otherwise dark and murky world of backroom deals among proponents of intellectual monopolies can be found in the reports on the U.S.-EU IPR Enforcement Working Group (doesn't that word "enforcement" really say it all?). Here are a couple of the highlights of the latest one:

The U.S. and EU both expressed a desire to engage labor movements in delivering a “positive and constructive message” about IPR protection and enforcement. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and IIPA (International Intellectual Property Association) were both very enthusiastic about this proposal.

Basically, the IM mob are desperately trying to con unions into doing their dirty work by pushing out propaganda on intellectual monopolies. I just love the line "The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and IIPA (International Intellectual Property Association) were both very enthusiastic about this proposal": you bet they are. Their own ham-fisted efforts have backfired so spectacularly that they are desperate for someone else not tainted by their inept approach of punishing consumers to try.

The following is also significant:

The discussion on future work mostly focus on climate change. General Electric and Microsoft were particularly outspoken in highlighting their fear that some current negotiations over green technology and IPR would weaken IPR. They also denounced the inclusion of proposals that limit patentable subject matter and recommend compulsory licenses or licenses of rights.

As well as Microsoft's usual bleating about not being allowed to patent software in some jurisdictions, it's interesting to note that both it and General Electric seem to rate the preservation of intellectual monopolies rather higher than the preservation of our planet. Pure evil. (Via Ray Corrigan.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Microsoft, Monsanto and Intellectual Monopolies

Here's a brilliant, must-read feature exposing some of the hidden agendas of the Green Revolution and the dark side of the Gates Foundation's work in Africa. In particular, it makes explicit the symmetry of Microsoft and Monsanto in their use of intellectual monopolies to make their users increasingly powerless:

The preference for private sector contributions to agriculture shapes the Gates Foundation's funding priorities. In a number of grants, for instance, one corporation appears repeatedly--Monsanto. To some extent, this simply reflects Monsanto's domination of industrial agricultural research. There are, however, notable synergies between Gates and Monsanto: both are corporate titans that have made millions through technology, in particular through the aggressive defense of proprietary intellectual property. Both organizations are suffused by a culture of expertise, and there's some overlap between them. Robert Horsch, a former senior vice president at Monsanto, is, for instance, now interim director of Gates's agricultural development program and head of the science and technology team. Travis English and Paige Miller, researchers with the Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, have uncovered some striking trends in Gates Foundation funding. By following the money, English told us that "AGRA used funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to write twenty-three grants for projects in Kenya. Twelve of those recipients are involved in research in genetically modified agriculture, development or advocacy. About 79 percent of funding in Kenya involves biotech in one way or another." And, English says, "so far, we have found over $100 million in grants to organizations connected to Monsanto."

This isn't surprising in light of the fact that Monsanto and Gates both embrace a model of agriculture that sees farmers suffering a deficit of knowledge--in which seeds, like little tiny beads of software, can be programmed to transmit that knowledge for commercial purposes. This assumes that Green Revolution technologies--including those that substitute for farmers' knowledge--are not only desirable but neutral. Knowledge is never neutral, however: it inevitably carries and influences relations of power.

I fear that with hindsight we will see that contrary to the almost universal view that Gates is redeeming his bad boy years at Microsoft with the good boy promises of his Foundation, Gates will actually do even more damage in the realm of agriculture than he has in the world of computing. (Via Roy Schestowitz.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.