this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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In the corpora-fascist future, all plants are copyrighted variants and you merely purchase a license to possess one plant.
That's not the future, man, that's the farms of today. Monsanto literally searches farms for seeds and will issue huge fines or cancel contracts if they find that farmers are harvesting seeds from their plants. Monsanto owns the rights to seeds.
Not only that, monsanto goes after neighboring farms if their neighbors use "patented" plants and claims they cannot harvest seeds because that would include the seeds that originate from the plants grown from the seeds blown by wind from their already fucked neighbors.
Now that is truly dystopian.
This is already happening. There's a company who copyrighted a breed of pineapple. They charge $400 for said pineapple and the company intentionally chops the top completely off, so that it cannot be propagated. Normally, you can take the green part of a pineapple, put it in the ground, and a few years later you'll have a new pineapple. It's ridiculous.
Most plant varieties are copywrited, or somwthing similar. It's not actually as crazy as it sounds but it's definitely abused, just like all copyright law.
Living things shouldn't be copyrighted tbh. Neither should food. Plants often being both, but always the first one at least.
I think if a company is going to dump millions into developing a new product, they should be able to at least recoup the investment they made.
Who's stopping them from doing that?
Most are specially bred to produce specific styles of fresh produce, like bananas, but this was the first company I'd heard of that removed the ability to propagate. (Aside from seedless stuff like watermelon/grapes) You can go to Japan and get one of the hundred dollar strawberries and you could technically keep the seeds. Lettuce, onion, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, berries, bananas, ginger, potatoes, corn; almost everything can grow from leftover cooking scraps. Plants are resilient.
Chopping the top off, is capitalism at its worst. I can understand not allowing another company to sell the genetically modified produce, but cutting off the top lowers the shelf life and makes it impossible to re-grow. It's pure greed... especially when it can take 3+ years for a pineapple to produce more fruit.
A time-limited license for Plant as a service. It’s a subscription model.
PaaS would be too-often confused with "platform as a service", it needs to be Vegetation as a Service (VaaS).
Doubly funny in dutch cuz vaas is Dutch for vase.
You joke, but this is very much a real thing. Even if you buy certain hybrids, it can be technically illegal to propagate from them. The plant will have a little note attached to it saying so.