Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol
The American Antitrust Institute submitted a paper Transgenic Seed Platforms:Competition Between a Rock and a Hard Place? to the DOJ/USDA joint workshop in which it attacked Monsanto. Monsanto fired back with a reply on the merits (also noting that DuPont, Monsanto's primary competitor, was a funder of the AAI paper).
One AAI position that seems quite drastic in that it significantly weakens IP rights in the seed context (and has far reaching consequences more generally in IP) was that "compulsory licensing without restrictions is the only approach to ensuring that rivals obtain the access needed to successfully innovate."