It is not merely a question of Anti Trust as for as Monsanto is concerned.it is a question of depleting soil ,disturbing food production and killing agriculturists( at least in India).The company should be closed.
Story:
No one wants to see a welcome sign that says “America: Land of Some Opportunity.” It would be an especially bad message to send if you wanted to encourage investments that drive economic growth, job creation, and exports.
Over the past 30 years, American investments in invention and creativity–activities protected by intellectual property law–produced world-class businesses in computer hardware and software, semiconductors, entertainment and biotechnology, making global icons of Avatar and Intel, Microsoft and Monsanto, Viacom and Viagra, among others. Market skeptics and less successful competitors, however, are pressing governments to use antitrust laws to limit returns to market-leading patent and copyright holders, pitting antitrust against intellectual property law. That’s a dangerous game.
Antitrust and intellectual property laws are complements, not opposites. Intellectual property law is designed to provide incentives for increased invention, development and diffusion of practical ideas and creative works. Antitrust is supposed to deter serious interference with normal operation of competition in commercial markets.
In a world in which more and more business involves competition based on ideas, intellectual property law helps protect some investments that provide the building blocks for future competition. Of course, being property laws, they function by granting exclusive control rights for a time. Any grant of exclusivity can be cast as limiting competition, but that is hardly useful to legal analysis. Antitrust doesn’t prohibit everything that limits competition in any way–a law that broad would bring commerce to a standstill by stopping the entire array of contracts and rights that underlie modern business. No one contends that antitrust law goes that far. Yet many scholars, lawyers and pundits casually assert that IP law conflicts with antitrust simply by limiting competition in some dimension.
Cases dealing with high-technology products are the common setting for claims that competition is unfairly impeded when a leading firm keeps others from building on patented or copyrighted technology that its rivals–having failed to supplant it with their own offerings–deem critical to success. Inevitably the technology at issue represents the result of successful investment in research and development, and gives the investor only temporary leadership unless it continues to innovate and successfully commercialize the right innovations. Just as Avatar doesn’t give James Cameron permanent hegemony over cinematic entertainment, other successes built on good ideas don’t guarantee continued leadership. Giving innovators exclusive rights to their innovations doesn’t prevent competition; it channels the competition into the search for better ideas and better ways of bringing them to consumers.
Surprisingly, inquiries by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice into competition in agriculture have elicited comments similarly miscasting market-leading innovation as an antitrust culprit to be eliminated, rather than an IP success to be emulated. Take, for instance, suggestions that the seed industry needs regulation because one company (Monsanto ( MON – news – people )) dominates competition for production of seeds that incorporate that company’s own patented, herbicide-resistant trait or very similar traits. The seed industry is highly competitive; farmers choose seeds each year and can switch producers if they please; hundreds of firms produce and sell seeds; and other major firms (including firms far larger than Monsanto) invest heavily in developing their own competing seeds and seed traits.
http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/11/antitrust-intellectual-property-monsanto-dupont-opinions-contributors-ronald-a-cass.html?partner=alerts
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