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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.

GMOs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. or anywhere else I know of. They can be patented, but the length of a patent term in most countries is 20 years. Golden Rice 2 was developed in 2005, so unless there's a newer version that Wikipedia doesn't mention, any possible patents will expire next year at the latest. Also, if a country considered patents a big concern it seems like the solution would be to not respect GMO patents or to specifically ban patented GMOs, rather than not allowing GMOs in general, which would reduce the incentive for companies to develop GMOs but still allow you to free-ride and to use GMOs with expired patents like golden rice will soon be.