Patents have gone mainstream. Those official government documents that provide temporary legal monopolies, and which not long ago were of interest primarily to geeky inventors and specialized attorneys, are now so much in the public consciousness, they are being explained—and ridiculed—on Comedy Central’s news-satire program The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
Host Jon Stewart and regular correspondent Aasif Mandvi took on Monsanto Co. and its seeds patents Thursday night, noting that the biotech giant is engaged in litigation with farmers over its genetically modified seeds.
“Big Farmer has forced Monsanto to pursue legal action against them over 500 times a year,” Mandvi quipped with more than a tinge of irony.
Mandvi, who interviewed both a farmer and McAndrews Held & Malloy patent attorney Scott McBride for his piece, was most likely citing figures published by the nonprofit Center for Food Safety ( here [PDF] and here [PDF]), which said that each year Monsanto investigates 500 farms whose fields purportedly contain Monsanto's patented crops. The nonprofit also said that as of 2006, Monsanto's internal records show that as many as 4,531 such cases may have been settled out of court.
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