Academic

Aoki on Open Source Seeds

By Lawrence Solum

Keith Aoki (University of California, Davis - School of Law) has posted Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture (Fordham Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the first paragraph:

In the context of user-innovation, agriculture has been a field where farmers substantively contributed to developing and improving existing and new plant varieties. This essay paraphrases Free Software Foundation and computer programmer par excellence Richard Stallman?s description of what ?free software? means in the context of what the open source software movement may have to impart to contemporary plant breeding. It looks at how the rise and expansion of intellectual property rights in plants and varieties during the twentieth century has significantly reduced the role of farmers in plant breeding, turning them into consumers providing labor to raise crops in which others hold the underlying intellectual property rights.

Please note that the abstract posted on SSRN is for a different paper--I'm sure this will be fixed soon.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on April 22, 2009 (boomark / email).