Agricultural ‘piracy’

From Wired:

“Monsanto’s ‘seed police’ snared soy farmer Homan McFarling in 1999, and the company is demanding he pay it hundreds of thousands of dollars for alleged technology piracy. McFarling’s sin? He saved seed from one harvest and replanted it the following season, a revered and ancient agricultural practice.

‘My daddy saved seed. I saved seed,’ said McFarling, 62, who still grows soy on the 5,000 acre family farm in Shannon, Mississippi, and is fighting the agribusiness giant in court.

Saving Monsanto’s seeds, genetically engineered to kill bugs and resist weed sprays, violates provisions of the company’s contracts with farmers.

Since 1997, Monsanto has filed similar lawsuits 90 times in 25 states against 147 farmers and 39 agriculture companies, according to a report issued Thursday by The Center for Food Safety, a biotechnology foe.”

Media Lab Europe to close

Well, well, there’s a blast from the past. According to The Register the Dublin outpost of the MIT Media Lab which was set up with much hype at the height of the Internet boom is to close. The reason? “Observers say the Lab’s biggest drawback as far as private-sector supporters were concerned, was the lack of near-term commercial potential for technologies developed there.

The [Irish] Minister for Communications, Noel Dempsey, [who provided some of the Lab’s funding] acknowledged that the lab was closing, and said it was a disappointment. He said its failure can be explained in part by the economic downturn that particularly affected the technology sector but also by the changing attitude of business to ‘non-directed research’.”

Nobody who knows anything about the attitude of most companies to research will be in the least surprised. If it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line before the CEO’s stock options mature, then forget it.

One problem with long-duration space missions…

This lovely cartoon by Chapatte of Les Temps appeared in today’s International Herald Tribune.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.