Tell that to the people who started 'Napster'.
Apparently you aren't aware of The Pirate Bay. Peer to peer file sharing didn't end with Napster, it just evolved past the ability for legal entities to track it, through decentralized magnet links and distributed hash tables. The only thing that really keeps it in check, honestly, is the chance of picking up very nasty viruses.
And speaking of what is and what is not illegal 'content', the Supreme Court has just ruled that it's unlawful for a farmer to set aside a portion of his harvest each year for use as seed stock for the following planting season if the original seed stock contained patented genetic material
Actually, no, they didn't rule that. I'm no Montsanto fan, but the ruling on this case wasn't at all about farmers saving seed, it was about a farmer who intentionally saved Montsanto Roundup Ready seed, in violation of his contractual agreement with Montsanto. The guy had a bunch of seed from different sources all mixed up, some small portion of which was Montsanto Roundup Ready, and he planted it, and ROUNDUPED IT, to kill off all the non-Montsanto plants. Then he stockpiled the resultant seed in a grain elevator, and planted off that. It was intentional, willful, manipulation of his own crop to distill out the Montsanto RR seed so he could plant it without paying Montsanto.
That case, in fact, has quite a lot of bearing to the thread. It could in fact be used as a legal test case for future 3d printing suits. If someone buys a tail light cover that has a US Patent, and copies it exactly, and replicates it with a 3d printer, then he'd be infringing on patent law. That's basically what this particular farmer did.
Now, I have heard of other cases where Montsanto went after farmers who were accidentally replanting Montsanto seed, but I can't seem to find any reference to them recently. Does anyone have a link? Montsanto's website says they only sue ten farmers a year, and only take one a year to court.
Again, no Montsanto fan, but I'd like a better case to ground my dislike of them than the one from a few days ago. That guy was just being an ass.
Mass food shortages would soon ruin there good name.
You are aware that they are also the company that invented Agent Orange and DDT, right? I don't think they really care about their name.
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