Greedy Monsanto pushes for complete domination of agriculture industry, desperately taking seed rights to Supreme Court

Not satisfied with being one of the world's dominant agri-business giants, Monsanto is taking its "seed rights" to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to gain complete domination of the world's agricultural production.

On Feb. 19, the nation's high court heard arguments in a case between Monsanto and Vernon Bowman, a 75-year-old Indiana farmer the agri-giant is suing over claims he has for years used seeds sown from a first crop of Monsanto Roundup Ready soybean seeds to grow subsequent crops.

Monsanto argues that Bowman's subsequent use of seeds violates the company's patent, noting that farmers sign an agreement when they buy the seeds to use them only one time. The resulting crop can later be sold off for things like feed or oil but not to create another generation of seeds, CNBC reported.

Monsanto - What's ours is ours

The agri-giant claims that reusing its seeds is much like stealing a copyrighted song or DVD. But Bowman and scores of other farmers believe that forcing them to buy new seeds every year is nothing more than a monopoly, and that Monsanto's patent should then "expire" after the first crop is grown.

So far, the federal courts have sided with Monsanto. A lower court agreed with the agri-giant but Bowman appealed, much to the chagrin of corporate America, which was surprised when the nation's highest court agreed to hear the case.

Monsanto says its multi-billion dollar seed industry is at stake. The company is dominant in the soybean market with its Roundup Ready-brand seeds, which the company has genetically modified so that farmers are able to spray week killer without damaging the soybeans (though a number of weeds are now becoming resistant to the Roundup Ready seeds).

The agri-giant says its GM seeds took years to develop and have helped farmers improve yields and keep costs down.

But how long should a company be compensated for something hard to create but easy to copy? That's what the high court will decide, and it's why there are other companies interested in how the high court will rule.

Filing amicus (friend of the court) briefs in support of the agri-giant is a broad array of industries, from the Business Software Association, which represents companies like Microsoft and Intel, to biotech firms and other soybean farmers who are worried that the prices of Monsanto seeds could skyrocket if it loses or that the company may scale back on its research and development.

A Monsanto loss "would effectively eliminate the incentive to discover and develop new genetically-engineers plants," the American Intellectual Property Law Association wrote in its brief.

But would that be so bad? And what about the fact that more U.S. farmers are moving away from GM seeds because of the development of "superweeds" that are resistant to Roundup?

"We're back to where we were 20 years ago," Tennessee farmer Eddie Anderson told The New York Times in April 2010, in response to why he had to return to using pesticides and plowing in order to deal with resistant weeds. "We're trying to find out what works."

'Darwinian evolution in fast-forward'

The first resistant weeds turned up in Delaware in 2000; the problem has only gotten worse since, with 10 resistant species growing in at least 22 states, infesting every crop from soybeans to cotton and corn.

"What we're talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward," Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, told the Times.

Then, of course, there is the fact that Monsanto recently spent millions to kill Prop. 37 in California, a measure that would have required labeling of GMO foods (http://www.naturalnews.com). This is the same agri-giant that once said there is no need to test GM foods because there is nothing wrong with them. (http://www.naturalnews.com)

Bowman may or may not win his case against Monsanto, but clearly the agri-giant is overstaying its welcome with farmers after years of litigating against them.

Sources:

Natural News

Ghost writer: New app to keep you tweeting after death

A new application will soon allow users to keep posting Twitter updates from beyond the grave, independently using intricate knowledge of your online character to create a virtual continuation of your personality after you die.

­“When your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting,” says the new application’s tagline.

‘LivesOn’ will let users pursue ‘life after death’ on their social media profiles, letting the deceased communicate with loved ones. LivesOn will keep posting after you kick the bucket, following the example of the DeadSocial platform.

Due to be launched in March, the LivesOn application will keep tweeting after you pass on. The service will utilize advanced analysis of your main Twitter feed, to carefully select appropriate subjects, likes, or articles that would have been likely to interest you, posting them on your behalf for your friends to read.

Pre-existing applications so far have only allowed users to schedule prepared updates.

Users of LivesOn can even nominate an ‘executor’ to their LivesOn will, who will decide whether to keep the account ‘live’.

A similar application was recently seen in a UK television program named Black Mirror, which showed a bereaved woman speaking to a virtually-constructed version of her deceased husband, which was built from his previous online communications, despite him not having laid any plans to maintain social media communications after his death.

The application is cut from the same cloth as one launched last April, named DeadSocial, and another Israeli application which was launched in January 2102, named If I Die. However, whereas LivesOn will base its postings on pre-existing models of your behavior, these currently-active applications allow their deceased users to send messages from beyond the grave to private Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts

Source: WHPTV

EU Court to Decide if Hyperlinking is Copyright Infringement

In what seems like an absurd court case, the European Union Court of Justice is trying to decide if hyperlinking is copyright infringement. As crazy it may be, the outcome of this case could have wide implications for the Internet.

For those who think there's no way that the EU court could possibly rule that linking is copyright infringement, I'll remind you of when the Department of Homeland Security seized several websites in 2011 for merely linking to copyright-infringing websites. The DHS claimed that the sites linking in to pirate websites was also a form of "direct criminal copyright infringement".

The court case in Europe concerns a Swedish journalist who claims that a subscription news link service owes him money for linking to his article. The subscription company, Retriever Sverige AB, refused to pay and said "Merely linking to a copyright work and displaying the resulting content within a frame did not constitute infringement."

The exact wording of question posed to the court is, “If anyone other than the holder of copyright in a certain work supplies a clickable link to the work on his website, does that constitute communication to the public within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society?”

In other words, do hyperlinks constitute a "communication to the public" that is protected by copyrights?

In a recently published paper presented to the court, the well-respected European Copyright Society (ECS) argues that it would be absurd to equate links with copyrighted communications,"If hyperlinking is regarded as communication to the public, all hyperlinks would need to be expressly licensed. In our view, that proposition is absurd.”

The ECS points out that hyperlinks are merely footnotes or references to the work of others which has always been permitted by copyright law.

"As Tim-Berners Lee, who is regularly accredited as being an inventor of the World Wide Web, has explained, a standard hyperlink is nothing more than a reference or footnote, and that the ability to refer to a document is a fundamental right of free speech," ECS emphasized.

The ECS also quoted law professor and author of Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age Jessica Litman who wrote "… the public has always had, and should have, a right to cite. Referring to a copyrighted work without authorization has been and should be legal. Referring to an infringing work is similarly legitimate … Drawing a map showing where an infringing object may be found or dropping a footnote that cites it invades no province the copyright owner is entitled to protect even if the object is blatantly pirated from a copyrighted work. Posting a hypertext link should be no different.”

They also issued a stern warning that regulating online linking would essentially destroy not only freedom of speech but also countless business ventures on the internet.

"The legal regulation of hyperlinking thus carries with it enormous capacity to interfere with the operation of the Internet, and therefore with access to information, freedom of expression, freedom to conduct business, as well – of course – with business ventures that depend on these types of linkages," they warned.

Who could argue with these statements by the ECS? Apparently only a greedy copyright troll can.

Virtually all websites are driven by hyperlinks. If the EU court was to rule that hyperlinks represent copyrighted communications that need to be licensed then Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Reddit and others would be put out of business immediately, and I seriously doubt that would be allowed to occur.

Stay tuned for the judgement in this case as it has huge implications for the Internet.

Note: This is the extent some copyright trolls are going to to challenge independent websites. If you have a blog that posts material from around the web, it's vital that you adhere to some basic copyright rules for aggregating content to avoid this type of absurd attack. Don't feed the trolls.

Source: Activist Post