You just moved the goalposts. In the comment Rayiner replied to, you invoked us-vs-them, but when challenged, you retreat to a substantive claim. Why not just concede his point and move on with your broader argument?
I don't think it was me that moved to the 'trespassing' analogy.
Monsanto claims those seeds are their intellectual property, when actually it is the process of modifying the seeds that they came up with. So they are claiming trespassing where in my view there is no such thing happening, they are claiming trespass on a public road.
The groups of people that I indicated that were splitting legal hairs over this can be divided into those that make a living splitting legal hairs and those that make a living plowing earth. If you feel that the latter are undeserving of protection against the former then fine, I concede. Personally I think that they should be allowed to get on with their lives without the IP battle being extended to their fields (pun intended).
It serves no purpose and I don't think that anything good can/will come of it, and potentially some very bad stuff may be the end result.
Now you're back to your original argument, which is that farmers are morally superior to lawyers because they plow the earth. How can that possibly make sense? There are legal protections that should be enjoyed by farmers but not lawyers?
That was Rayiner's response to you and it seems self-evidently true. We strive towards a rule of law, not a rule of farmers, or a rule of philosopher kings who pick the meritorious occupations and penalize the rest.
Vernon Bowman didn't simply plant Roundup-Ready seeds by accident. He purchased clearly-marked Roundup-Ready seeds at commodity seed prices and then sprayed his fields with glyphosphate-based herbicides to take advantage of it. That isn't Monsanto's contention; Bowman admits to having done it. Maybe he's right and there's a patent exhaustion claim that makes doing that lawful, but it's hard to argue that Monsanto shouldn't have their day in court to verify it.
> but it's hard to argue that Monsanto shouldn't have their day in court to verify it.
No, it's in fact very easy to argue that. And in case you failed to notice that was exactly my point. Farmers work their ground, they've been doing so for many thousands of years.
Intellectual property and farming should be mutually exclusive fields, anybody should be able to grow anything to the best of their ability without the fear of being sued. I know that you disagree with this, that you believe that it is A-ok for big company 'x' to sue farmer 'y' for violation of their intellectual property (assuming for the moment that such a thing exists) but I'd much prefer for things not to be like that. It's an opinion, you can disagree with it but you can't disallow me to have that opinion or 'force me to concede a point' in which I do not believe.
The rule of law should not extend to your ability to grow food from seeds, to royalties paid on such seeds or to any derivative thereof.
Here you restate the moral superiority of farming over IP enforcement, but miss the fact that were your principle made the law of the land, there would be no Roundup-Ready seeds for Bowman to have planted. Again, the facts of this case are that Bowman directly benefited from Monsanto's product.
Incidentally, the rule of law's grip on the seed trade is centuries (millenia?) old. Agriculture is a very big part of the reason we have law to begin with.
> Now you're back to your original argument, which is that farmers are morally superior to lawyers because they plow the earth.
I don't see that claim anywhere in the message you replied to. I see a claim that he believes that someone should be able to buy seeds and use whatever herbicides one wants with them without a risk of being sued for IP infringements.
That is not an argument about the moral standing of either farmers or lawyers, but an argument about where he believes one of the restrictions on patents should be drawn.
Monsanto claims those seeds are their intellectual property, when actually it is the process of modifying the seeds that they came up with. So they are claiming trespassing where in my view there is no such thing happening, they are claiming trespass on a public road.