Or sprout the next season as “volunteers.” Tomatoes are notorious for that. So are sunflowers, as we found out. We had a battalion of them standing at attention this year from the previous season, all cross-pollinated into weird hybrids Burpee never intended. Ten footers with dozens of blooms, big canary yellow ones, red ones, you name it. The local blue jays love ‘em.

I can see how seedless grapes and watermelon could be new, but you should figure out where bananas come from.

it would be neat if someone did a historical and economic projection of what life would be like had they been slapped with stringent EULAs too.

i’m guessing avocados would cost $20 a piece, and then we’d have an overabundance of that other type that just tastes like crap

i’m all for spreading this EULA craze to it’s illogical limits. let’s put EULAs on everything. our money, our cars, our mirrors, our kids. the only way to illuminate the absurdity of this trend is to push it to the extreme.

@#18: right on! what about reverse EULAs ? if they can arbitrarily offer these “agreements”, why can’t we just as arbitrarily offer refusals ?

“no, i don’t agree”. simple as that.

What if I have the express written consent of Major League Baseball?

I seed what you did there.

Most likely, the cultivar of grape in the image above is protected under the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) Act of 1970:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Variety_Protection_Act

In short, the breeder is given exclusive rights to propagation of a specific cultivar for 25 years.

If protected under a plant patent, then it’s a little different, but still very old (from 1930):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930

They are rarely misused as they are employed and written better than stupid USPTO applications tend to be, slapping patents on obvious things like one-click buttons.

The reason is quite obvious, and actually tends to protect smaller growers. If a breeder were to develop a new, potentially valuable cultivar, it would be simple enough for a big agricultural concern to purchase a single plant and run it through a lab in order to produce virtually unlimited numbers of genetically identical clones. This, too, is nothing new; cloning of animals is much more sophisticated than for plants, and the technology is well-established. From nut trees to strawberries, plants have been cloned for decades.

So, Big Business, Inc. purchases a single plant, clones it a million times, plants the crop and harvests them, leaving the original producer without recourse. Frankly, that does not benefit small growers who might otherwise be encouraged to develop such crops.

So, no; it’s not nearly so silly as it superficially appears.

But is it? There were vast numbers of cultivars of food and other plants before the advent of agribusiness. There were varieties that had evolved, sometimes with human help, to grow in every imaginable climate and condition. The advent of agribusiness and it’s monoculture of flavorless, shippable foodstuffs eradicated the overwhelming majority of food bio-diversity. Agribusiness destroyed the resource. Now they’re reinventing the resource and claiming ownership of it. My lack of sympathy – let me sho u it.

They want to own life. I mean, this is the building blocks of food we are talking about. They are in the process of owning food, all food.

I think the restriction was against cutting the bulb in two pieces, separating them and getting two plants for the price of one.

I’ve got a shower curtain where the English part of the label says “Made in Pakistan” while the Spanish part says “Hecho en USA”.

1. Not be surprised that IP is the weapon of choice for Zaninovich
2. Expect bad things from McCarthy on the IP front

Badump bump!

Now, the individual who purchases it can make as many “copies” as they like, dividing it, growing it from cuttings, etc., for their own purposes. But they cannot sell them. I think they can be given away- I’m a little hazy on that.

The whole idea is to keep another company’s lab from cloning them and profiting.

@ #47- Occasionally “seedless” grapes will have seeds. They’re not all sterile.

Anyways, I’ve never looked for EULAs on my food, but I’m not worried: how would you ever even enforce something like this?

I reserve the right to reject the validity of anything resembling an EULA as being legally binding.