I agree whole-heartedly. I don't like the makeup of the court, dislike everything I've ever heard about Monsanto, and have serious reservations about patented organisms. Even so, I have a hard time impugning any unanimous ruling by SCOTUS.
Did they really? My understanding is that they would only be able to do this if Mr Bowman had tried to challenge the validity of the patent on that grounds. While the link to the decision is broken, the article makes no mention of him arguing against the validity of the patent at all.
If you don't want to believe that it's possible for a government to be corrupt, or perhaps our government in particular that's fine. I can't stop you. But it's silly to assume that I'm a crazy person simply because I find it plausible that corruption (which is a thing proven to exist in the real world we live in) could happen inside the government as well as outside it.
EDIT: spelling
When judges do not have a personal interest in code (like Judge Alsop had, at least a little bit), and no personal interest in the nature of genetics and biology, it's simple for an Oracle or a Monsanto to make reasonable sounding (but completely wrong) arguments and for the court to accept them.
I don't think critical thinking is effective without at least a little personal investigation into the subject matter. Judges depend on reading opposing arguments and distilling the essence of the conflict from that, but in some subjects you can't get an understanding of the essence of the conflict without a neutral investigation of the subject itself.
(Of course, the nature and existence of a distinction between a "legal matter" and a "moral matter" is a famously controversial issue ... but that's a different kettle of fish altogether.)
I'm not a Monsanto supporter by any means, but there is no prior-art for a tailor-made organism, is there? The genetically-modified version of the Monsanto soybean has no prior-art. Unless you consider all soybeans as prior-art.
Also they didn't tailor-make the organism. They took a "regular" soybean and added some resistance to it. Had they invented a monsanto bean from scratch that had the resistance then sure.
Furthermore there are people who are infringing on Monsantos patents by virtue of Monsanto soybeans freely and openly spreading their genetic material through the air.
Imagine if the reprap people had designed their printer to be 3d printed (which they did) and then patented it and tried to sue people for using their reprap to 3d print the parts for another reprap. Pretty shitty huh? Now imagine that the reprap came pre-configured to print reprap parts and as soon as you plugged it in it started making them. Along with a note that said "look this printer is going to print parts and there's nothing that can be done about it. But if you want to use those parts, you have to send us a check for $500"
Why does something that's utterly ridiculous in one domain seem perfectly acceptable in another?
I was talking about the latter (owning a modified gene), but I completely agree that it is ridiculous to "own" a gene just because you were able to identify and extract it. I recall many years ago there was a row when a bunch of biotech firms were trying to patent the genome for Basmati rice and Turmeric. The Indian government was not happy because there were native plants and it would be ridiculous to pay licensing fees to some biotech firms in the US to grow plants that were native to the country.
That depends on what sort of a patent you attempt to cover it under. If you cover it under a molecule patent, (like what myriad is doing) then that's legit, but your patent only covers the PCR product. It's pretty trivial to break such a patent.
An analogy would be as such: You buy a computer chip. Exhaustion means that the patentholder cannot restrict you from breaking it open and examining the chip with a microscope, or even making a clone that presents the same API to the pinset, or reselling the original chip without compensation to the original manufacturer. What would be against the law, though, would be to take the knowledge you get from the chip, make a copy of large sections of it, and then resell this.
We just had a ruling that the first sale doctrine is in fact real for copyrighted items and that they can't be controlled after they were sold once. They're selling an organism that makes copies of itself. The onus is on them to control that by engineering the plant to produce non-fertile seeds. If they can tailor make a plant to resist roundup why can't they make it not produce infringing copies of itself?
Imagine if Hollywood sold DVDs or Blurays that spat out two DVDs after you played and then ejected the movie. And you were required to destroy one of the copies lest you run afoul of their copyright. Wouldn't they get laughed out of court?
You can't patent organisms, in general. You can, however patent plant varietals that are the product of breeding programs. For the supreme court to overturn this would be a very edgy violation of the separation of powers. The constitution gives congress the authority to define IP and set copyright and patenting law, not the supreme court.
edit: read the NYT article which has further comments by the court, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/business/monsanto-victorio...
It would be interesting to see a case where The seed were used as if they were conventional soybeans, especially if the farmer didn't know that they contained patented genes.
According to my (inexpert) reading of the opinion, it wouldn't matter and the result would have been the same. But maybe there are other defenses that could have been employed if the facts were different. Certainly the policy argument would look a lot different, even if the legal argument remained the same.