http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/13/183729491/Supreme-Court-Sides-With-Monsanto-In-Seed-Patent-Case
(Excerpt)
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that when farmers use patented seed for more than one planting in violation of their licensing agreements, they are liable for damages.
Billed as David vs. Goliath, the case pitted an Indiana farmer against the agribusiness behemoth Monsanto.
Almost all the soybean farmers in the U.S. use seed that is genetically altered to be resistant to weed killers like Roundup. That allows farmers to spray for weeds without killing the soybeans. But the seed is three times more expensive than regular unpatented seed, so some farmers have tried to use regenerated seed to save money.
Case in point, 75-year-old farmer Hugh Bowman, who regularly bought Monsanto's Roundup-resistant soybean seed for his first growth and signed a licensing agreement promising to use all the seed and not to use any regenerated seed for future use. But Bowman also had other riskier, lower-yield plantings, and for those, he wanted "a cheap source of seed."
So he went to the local grain elevator where farmers drop off their harvested soybeans, and he bought and planted some of those, knowing that those beans would likely also be Roundup-resistant.
He eventually produced eight separate crop yields using the second and third generations of the grain elevator seed, and he was quite open about what he was doing.
"I couldn't imagine that they'd give a rat's behind," he said.
But they — namely, Monsanto — did. The company sued Bowman, as it has sued other farmers. Bowman lost in the lower courts and was ordered to pay $84,000 in damages to Monsanto. He appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
