Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (6/12/13)
A federal appeals court slapped down a quixotic legal campaign against Monsanto's biotech patents this week.
Organic farmers had gone to court to declare those patents invalid. The farmers, according to their lawyers, were "forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement" if their field became contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed.
Instead, the judges — echoing the ruling of a lower court — told the farmers that they were imagining a threat that doesn't exist.
"There is no justiciable case or controversy," they wrote. Monsanto says that it won't sue anyone for accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops, and the organic farmers couldn't come up with any cases in which this had happened.