[brownbat]

Patenting plants is one reasonable extension, and the one we've gone with.

But it wouldn't have been totally crazy if justices had decided that when you sell something that by its very nature self replicates, you cannot get too upset when it does exactly that.

Agriculture is like other goods in that it can have costly r&d we want to incentivize, so we might want to prevent copying. But it's a bit different, in that it comes preprogrammed and desperate to break all these rules.

I feel like there was a time this could have gone either way, but it was probably quite a while back.