Free the Seeds!
24th May 2015
The Open Source Seed Initiative wants to make carrot seeds more like software. That may seem like an odd project, but consider this: It’s currently possible to patent plants with certain traits, whether they are created through traditional breeding or biotech modification. Worried that the trend of increasingly vague, aggressively enforced patents was discouraging innovation, a group of scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison got together in 2012 with the goal of producing and distributing seeds outside of the conventional intellectual property framework—much in the same way that the open source Linux operating system exists in parallel with Microsoft Windows and iOS, or the anyone-can-edit resource Wikipedia competes with Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The situation is so bad that if a farmer buys seed from, say, Monsanto and raises a crop, that farmer cann0t use that seed to plant another crop because Monsanto can (and will) sue his ass off for patent infringement. Patent and copyright are relics of statism past that need to be excised from our polity if we don’t want progress to come grinding to a halt.