“It’s food! Really.”

There’s a lot of money to be made if you own both the lock and the key that opens it. Chemicals are Monsanto’s game, so if I told you that they owned both the poison and the antidote you might call it pragmatism. But Monsanto’s real coup was licensing its genetically-modified seeds to the world’s farmers based primarily on the promise that Monsanto’s GM seeds produce higher yields. Cleverly, Monsanto has engineered these seeds to be resistant to their “broad-spectrum” herbicide called Roundup, which is the second half of the bargain.

This alone puts Monsanto in a profitable position, but there’s even more money to be made. Being that farmers can’t own Monsanto’s patented seeds, they must instead license a new batch after each harvest. This turns the ancient practice of seed-saving into a crime, and in response Monsanto has dispatched undercover crop police to root out (ahem) the criminal farmers, and try them for violation of intellectual property rights, patent infringement, and seed piracy.

Still, you can see why farmers would be tempted by Monsanto’s siren song. If you don’t believe that biotechnology has real environmental and health benefits, just ask Monsanto — they have an army of scientists ready with the findings. But the plants that grow from Monsanto’s seed stock don’t keep to themselves. Just as Monsanto’s representatives have infiltrated the upper echelons of our government, Monsanto’s plants produce their own seeds and pollens, and it’s not long before surrounding crops are bombarded by foreign DNA, leading to contamination of the natural surrounding ecosystem, bizarre mutations, and new vulnerability to disease. (This doesn’t just apply to Monsanto, of course. In 2002 a corn engineered by Prodigene to produce pharmaceutical medicines contaminated corn and soybean fields in Iowa and Nebraska.)

Still, farmers remain upbeat about the promise of Monsanto’s products.

[Monsanto’s] seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

(via washingtonpost.com)

The dinosaurs might have said the same thing about that meteor.

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(via Boing Boing)

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Seiko Epson’s complaint, filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), calls for a general exclusion order banning the import or sale of less expensive third party cartridges in the U.S.

Epson is able to sell cheap printers because its business model is such that profits can be gained from the sale of replacement ink cartridges. However, Epson is not so interested in fair competition, from outward appearances. And who can blame them? After posting a 56 percent drop in quarterly profits last month, and with more losses forecasted, the company can barely afford to play on an even field.

Meanwhile, the question for consumers becomes: would you buy a toaster that accepted only one brand of bread?

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It’s worth mentioning that AMC is soon to be the second-largest U.S. theatre chain after its merger with Loews Cineplex. So, while the documentary will open at Loews theatres next month, AMC’s acquisition of Loews can only foreshadow the kind of censorship endemic to media consolidation, a symptom of the same disease that now plagues the airwaves. ThinkFilm President and Chief Executive Jeff Sackman said:

“You’re going to have two theater circuits dominant in the country, and they’re going to say, ‘We don’t think you should see this movie.’”

But what’s most interesting to this moviegoer (or “consumer,” as they refer to us) is that, while a documentary without violence or nudity has been deemed too rich for AMC’s blood, the company remains more than happy to peddle a staggering amount of commercial tripe in the form of music and video “advertainment.” Your typical AMC experience includes pop contemporary hits blaring from every speaker, provided by AMC partner Movie Tunes (“Advertiser Benefit: Low clutter, no tune-out – captive audience”). And then, the crown jewel of AMC’s monetization blitz, the “Pre-Show Countdown,” brought to you by AMC’s commercial subsidiary National Cinema Network.

AMC and Regal announced, in March 2005, that they were combining their cinema advertising divisions into one company, which will produce a shared pre-show. At least we know who to boycott.

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Writing for First Monday, Michael Geist details the elaborate myths the RIAA and CRIA have constructed, distilled into three key points:

First, that the Canadian recording industry has sustained significant financial losses in recent years due to decreased music sales. Second, that those losses can be attributed to peer–to–peer file sharing. Third, that the losses have materially harmed Canadian artists.

The time has come to acknowledge that each of these pillars is a myth.

The paper is quite thorough, but the gist of it is that industry’s complaints of financial devastation come not from illegal music downloading, but rather from “exaggerated” reactionary claims which conveniently ignore the measurable growth of DVD sales, the rise of alternate forms of entertainment (e.g., cellphones, videogames), and, most interestingly, industry-strangling weeds like Wal–Mart, which caps retail pricing in the United States at US$9.72 per CD.

All signs point to P2P being a convenient scapegoat for the music industry’s financial downturn. How else to explain, for example, the 11% falloff in CD sales during the 1991 economic recession–a sharper drop than the most recent downturn? Nice try, RIAA.

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