Say you’re a Hollywood studio who spent a couple hundred million dollars on a blockbuster movie. Someone buys it on DVD, and then proceeds to copy the DVD and sell those copies at a profit.

That would be against the law.

Can you make the same argument about buying patented seeds to grow a crop, and then keeping some of that first crop to reap seeds and grow a second crop?

The United States Supreme Court will decide that in a case involving a 75-year-old farmer from Indiana named Vernon Bowman. Monsanto sued Bowman in 2007, claiming the farmer has for years used seeds reaped from a first crop of Monsanto Roundup Ready soybean seeds to grow another crop.

Monsanto said that violates its patent, as farmers sign an agreement when they buy the seeds to only use them once. The resulting crop can be sold for things like feed or oil, not to create another generation of seeds.

From Monsanto’s perspective, what Bowman has done is like the farming version of Napster. From the farmer’s perspective, to force him to buy new seeds every year is a monopoly, and Monsanto’s patent should ‘expire’ after the first crop.

Monsanto won in lower court, but Bowman […]