FC: More on "Food for thought" -- an editorial in Wednesday's WSJ

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

************

Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:01:56 -0700
From: Lizard <lizard () dnai com>
To: declan () well com, politech () vorlon mit edu
Subject: Re: FC: Food for thought or something to gag on? (antitrust suit)

Of course, if the suit is succesful, this will mean an *increase* in
GM foods, since small companies which couldn't do the research will
now be able to sponge off the work done by the giants. Mr. Rifkins
insatiable lust for publicity might just bring about the geneered
world he fears...and sane men lust for.

***********

From: "Riley, Jason" <Jason.Riley () wsj com>
To: "'Declan McCullagh'" <declan () well com>
Subject: RE: Food for thought or something to gag on? (antitrust suit)
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 14:09:11 -0400

(WSJ editorial, 9/15/99)

Seeds of Trouble 

We guess the guy who came up with the name "terminator" gene won't be
getting his bonus this year. It's one of the reasons that a plague of
plaintiffs lawyers is now descending on the agricultural biotech industry. 

The unfortunately ominous sounding term is in fact used to describe a method
by which biotech companies produce seeds that are infertile after the first
generation, thereby helping them recoup development costs through ongoing
sales to their farming customers. By allowing companies to protect their
intellectual property, such a technology should prove an enormous spur to
agricultural innovation, which has already done so much to increase crop
production around the world.

But an incoming litigants' plague is painting a very different picture: One
of a world in which the rights to all important crops are held by a handful
of large multinational corporations, such as DuPont, Monsanto and Novartis.
On Monday it was announced that a coalition of biotech adversaries would
file multibillion-dollar antitrust lawsuits in as many as 30 countries later
this year. Twenty different American law firms will reportedly be arguing on
their behalf.

And the publicity will be handled by none other than-Jeremy Rifkin. 

Longtime readers of this page will recognize Mr. Rifkin. If memory serves,
the indefatigable promoter first opened his biotech tent by filing a lawsuit
in 1984 against a University of California experiment to fight frost damage
in a field of potatoes using genetically altered bacteria. Years of similar
Rifkin-driven court cases against biotech ensued, until the issue burned
itself out, with biotechnology going on to become one of the showcase
industries of late-20th-century America. 

The plague of lawyers, meanwhile, is led by corporate shakedown artist
Michael Hausfeld. He has sued Exxon for the Valdez oil spill, Texaco for
alleged racial discrimination, Swiss banks over Nazi-era Jewish claims, and
the makers of infamous "Fen-Phen" diet pill. The German conglomerate BASF
has fallen victim to Mr. Hausfeld on two entirely different counts: alleged
vitamin price fixing and the use of slave labor during the Nazi era. 

The plaintiffs in these cases are something called the National Family Farm
Coalition, plus individual farmers from around the world.

Of course bigness is not badness in legal terms, so the plaintiffs and
lawyers know they have to point to some practices as "abuse" of a dominant
position. But the best they seem to be able to come up with is a specious
semantic distinction regarding the nature of the agreements between biotech
companies and farmers. 

Seeds are not really "sold" anymore, Messrs. Rifkin and Hausfeld both told
us; they are effectively "leased." But a lease is after all a form of
purchase: of a service, not a piece of property. And we don't see how it
would be any harder for dissatisfied customers to stop "leasing" than stop
"buying."

Nor, apparently, do most knowledgeable observers. Shares of most of the
companies that are potential targets in this lawsuit don't seem to have been
affected by the announcement, with analysts describing the action as both
"ludicrous" and a "publicity stunt." The global seed market, they observed,
is not very concentrated.

It's early in the development of this industry, which may make them
vulnerable to spooky lawyers' tales, but that also suggests a normal course
for their social maturation. Obviously, the seed companies want to protect
their youthful intellectual property. But like the software and
entertainment people before them, they're going to find there are limits to
what you can do. Push too hard and you end up swamped by bootlegs. We
suspect the high-tech seed people will eventually learn from Microsoft: Give
farmers a broad, open-ended license to use a particular seed variety, then
try to keep them coming back with upgrades. 

Of course, any such lawsuit is a try-the-lock operation, and it's
conceivable that a court or jury will tumble in one of the international
venues. If that suppresses the development of this business, the losers will
be the billions of people around the world for whom biotechnology promises a
better life. Even in the developed world, after all, it wasn't so long ago
that food was scarce and expensive enough that "a chicken in every pot" was
actually a resonant political slogan.
If some 16 years after he sued his first potato field Mr. Rifkin still
worries  about what you get when you cross a firefly with a plant, he's free
to do so. For our part, we're more worried about what you get when you cross
a scaremonger with a tort lawyer.

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