US Supreme Court finds for Monsanto in seed patent battle

The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto today over an Indiana farmer accused of having pirated the genetically-modified crops developed by the agribusiness giant.
The high court was unanimous in its decision, ruling that laws limiting patents do "not permit a farmer to reproduce patented seeds through planting and harvesting without the patent holder's permission."
The crux of the argument was over "patent exhaustion" which states that, after a patented item has been sold, the purchaser has "a right to use or resell that article," Justice Elena Kagan explained in the court's 10-page decision.
"Such a sale, however, does not allow the purchaser to make new copies of the patented invention," she added.

The ruling gave Monsanto shares a bounce after falling more than one percent in opening trade today.
In a lawsuit filed in 2007, Monsanto had accused Vernon Hugh Bowman, a farmer, of infringing on its intellectual property rights by replanting, cultivating and selling herbicide-resistant soybean seeds it spent more than a decade developing.

The patented seed, which allows farmers to aerially spray Monsanto-made Roundup herbicide over their entire fields, was invented in 1996 and is now grown by more than 90 percent of the 275,000 US soybean farmers.
The farmer, 75, said he had respected his contract with Monsanto and purchased new Roundup Ready seeds each year for his first planting.

But he said hard times forced him to purchase a cheaper mixture of seeds from a grain elevator starting in 1999, which he used for his second planting.
The mixture included Roundup Ready soybeans, which Bowman was able to isolate and replant from 2000 to 2007.
"Under the patent exhaustion doctrine, Bowman could resell the patented soybeans he purchased from the grain elevator; so too he could consume the beans himself or feed them to his animals," Kagan explained.
"But the exhaustion doctrine does not enable Bowman to make additional patented soybeans without Monsanto's permission (either express or implied).
"And that is precisely what Bowman did," she said.

The court found that the law rightly protects Monsanto from such a practice because, "were the matter otherwise, Monsanto's patent would provide scant benefit.