Owning Nature

I watched a part of a documentary called "the future of food" on hulu.com the other day and was amazed at what i heard. The Mansanto Company genetically engineered canola seed that was resistant to round-up. This would allow the seeds to be planted, sprayed with round-up, and have only the canola seed survive. This seed found its way into thousands of farmers fields as a result of wind and animal dispersal. A lot of seed present in farmers fields is believed to have fallen off trucks hauling large quantity of the seed. The Mansanto Company then went around collecting samples from farmers fields and threatened to sue any farmer that had canola plants that came from their seeds growing. Thousands of farmers paid the company to avoid lawsuits and destroyed their stockpiles of seed. The reason they were able to do this was because the company had patented the seed. This result was even held up in the court of law, with the judges saying it was the farmers responsibility to make sure the seed wasn't growing in their field. Personally I find this amazing and wrong. I feel it should be the company's responsible to contain their seed. If it is on the farmer the company could easily spread their seed simply for the purpose of suing the farmer. I don't see how the Mansanto Company can own a plant, it seems unethical. The dispersal of the seed can't be controlled or stopped. If this type of trend would continue nothing would be allowed to grow without copyright payments being made to a company every time a tree or plant reproduced. This whole idea seems unethical to me and another problem farmers shouldn't have to deal with.