Monsanto, famous for the biotech backlashes it helped spur, from Agent Orange to BT corn, is at it again.

According to this Wired story:

[…] Monsanto officials say labels like « No rBST » or « rBST-free » are misleading, unfair and deceptive. The company has recently sued one dairy for its labels. « 

Should commercial speech include freedom of creating labels for any purpose? I’d be curious to hear any counter argument.

Commercial freedom of speech is a topic I don’t know anything about, but the most border line case I heard about is Kasky v. Nike that was recently settled. Outside from clearly deceptive speech (or libel, or hate speech, outside the US), can’t one freely represent the characteristics of his products? Maybe we should ask the makers of « new and improved flavour » dog food? Or what about Kosher labels?

More details on the lawsuit , Oakhurst Dairy , Monsanto’s press release, and the FDA’s opinion on labels: the main issue for them seems to be that « no hormones » would be misleading since a) there are cow hormones in any milk b) rbST is a synthesized version of bovine somatotropin and there is no difference in the hormones detectable in the milk, except, presumably, proportions.

It seems that rbST-free, instead of hormone-free would be Ok according to the FDA. Anyone with a link to the actual documents for this case?

The Canadian chapter of the Association littéraire et artistique internationale is holding regular conference/dinner events in Montréal on various intellectual property topics.

The next one will certainly be interesting: Open source software : avoiding the pitfalls, reaping the rewards.

Here we go again. After the Globe and Mail, Tech Central station is letting the scoop out to the Slashdot crowd.

Regarding the issue of exporting the litigation spree to Canada, beyond the issue of private copying creating more non infringing practices, another point to keep in mind is the absence in Canadian copyright law of disproportionately high statutory penalties, coupled with a widespread aversion in the judiciary for the American school of civil damage awarding.

Meanwhile, I must say did my part protesting the current state of affairs by shamelessly using and abusing my rights to private copying this week-end. Which made me realize that using dual firewire buses is preferable to daisy chaining CD-writers, 52x is not enough, neither are dual processors, and that currently available backup technologies (short of DLTs and a mortgage) are totally ill equipped to deal with current hard drive sizes.

Update: Joho the Blog also discovered this. I’m amazed that this was not widely known, considering the outrages, notably on Slashdot, when the levy was adopted and subsequently raised.

Martine fait un rapprochement entre les pubs larmoyantes anti-pirates au ciné, qui font l’éloges des artisans du 7e art, et le fait que la principale source de films contrefaits est bien ces artisans eux-mêmes.