WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that farmers could not use Monsanto’s patented genetically altered soybeans to create new seeds without paying the company a fee. 
 
 The ruling has implications for many aspects of modern agriculture and for businesses based on vaccines, cell lines and software. But Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, emphasized that the decision was narrow. 
 
 “Our holding today is limited — addressing the situation before us, rather than every one involving a self-replicating product,” she wrote. “We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex and diverse. In another case, the article’s self-replication might occur outside the purchaser’s control. Or it might be a necessary but incidental step in using the item for another purpose.” 
 
 But Justice Kagan had little difficulty ruling that an Indiana farmer’s conduct in the case before the court, Bowman v. Monsanto Company, No. 11-796, had run afoul of patent law. 
 
 Farmers who buy Monsanto’s patented seeds must generally sign a contract promising not to save seeds from the resulting crop, which means they must buy new seeds every year. The seeds are valuable because they are resistant to the herbicide Roundup, itself a Monsanto product. 
 
 But the Indiana farmer, Vernon Hugh Bowman, who had signed such contracts for his main crop, said he discovered a loophole for a second, riskier crop later in the growing season. 
 
 For that second crop, he bought seeds from a grain elevator filled with a mix of seeds in the reasonable hope that many of them contained Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready gene. 
 
 Seeds from grain elevators are typically sold for animal feed, food processing or industrial uses. But Mr. Bowman planted them and sprayed them with Roundup. Many plants survived, and he replanted their seeds. 
 
 Monsanto sued, and a federal judge in Indiana ordered Mr. Bowman to pay the company more than $84,000. The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent cases, upheld that decision, saying that by planting the seeds Mr. Bowman had infringed Monsanto’s patents. 
 
 Justice Kagan agreed, suggesting that Mr. Bowman had been too clever for his own good. 
 
 Mr. Bowman’s main argument was that a doctrine called patent exhaustion allowed him to do what he liked with products he had obtained legally. But Justice Kagan said it did not apply to the way he had used the seeds. 
 
 “Under the patent exhaustion doctrine, Bowman could resell the patented soybeans he purchased from the grain elevator; so too he could consume the beans himself or feed them to his animals,” she wrote. 
 
 “But the exhaustion doctrine does not enable Bowman to make additional patented soybeans without Monsanto’s permission,” she added, and went on to say that “that is precisely what Bowman did.” 
 
 Justice Kagan said that allowing Mr. Bowman’s tactic would destroy the value of Monsanto’s patent. “The exhaustion doctrine is limited to the ‘particular item’ sold,” she wrote, “to avoid just such a mismatch between invention and reward.” 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Mr. Bowman acknowledged the general principle that he had no right to make a new product with Monsanto’s seeds. But he said he had used the seeds precisely as they were intended to be used — planting them “in the normal way farmers do,” Justice Kagan wrote. 
 
 Accepting that theory, she wrote, would create an “unprecedented exception” to the exhaustion doctrine. “If simple copying were a protected use,” she wrote, “a patent would plummet in value after the first sale of the item containing the invention.” 
 
 Mr. Bowman also argued in briefs that soybeans naturally “self-replicate or ‘sprout’ unless stored in a controlled manner,” meaning that “it was the planted soybean, not Bowman,” that created the new seeds. 
 
 Justice Kagan rejected what she called “that blame-the-bean defense.” 
 
 “Bowman was not a passive observer of his soybeans’ multiplication,” she wrote, adding: “Put another way, the seeds he purchased (miraculous though they might be in other respects) did not spontaneously create eight successive soybean crops.” 
 
 “It was Bowman, and not the bean,” she wrote, “who controlled the reproduction (unto the eighth generation) of Monsanto’s patented invention.” ||||| Farmer's Fight With Monsanto Reaches The Supreme Court 
 
 toggle caption Dan Charles/NPR 
 
 This week, the Supreme Court will take up a classic David-and-Goliath case. On one side, there's a 75-year-old farmer in Indiana named Vernon Hugh Bowman; on the other, the agribusiness giant Monsanto. 
 
 The farmer is fighting the long reach of Monsanto's patents on seeds — but he's up against more than just Monsanto. The biotech and computer software industries are taking Monsanto's side. 
 
 Bowman also is battling a historic shift that's transformed the nation's seed business over the past 20 years. 
 
 Despite all that, Bowman seems remarkably cheerful about his situation. "Confrontation does not take a toll on me!" he says. "You and me can argue about the Bible; we can argue about religion. I'll pound my fist and we can argue all day, and I won't lose a bit of sleep at night!" 
 
 Bowman is leaning back in an easy chair, where he says he also sleeps at night. He lives alone in a modest white frame house outside the small town of Sandborn, in southwestern Indiana. 
 
 Out back, there's an array of old farm equipment collected during decades of growing corn and soybeans. 
 
 Bowman is wearing a Monsanto hat. It's probably an ironic gesture, but in fact, he's been a pleased and loyal customer of the company's seeds. He thinks the genes that Monsanto inserted into soybeans are just great. They let soybeans survive the country's most popular weedkiller: glyphosate, also known as Roundup. He can spray that one chemical to get rid of the weeds without harming his crop. 
 
 "It made things so much simpler and better. No question about that," he says. 
 
 Bowman uses these "Roundup Ready" soybeans for his main crop, which he plants in the spring, and he signs a standard agreement not to save any of his harvest and replant it the next year. Monsanto demands exclusive rights to supply that seed. 
 
 toggle caption Dan Charles/NPR 
 
 But here's where Bowman got into trouble: He also likes to plant a second crop of soybeans, later in the year, in fields where he just harvested wheat. 
 
 Those late-season soybeans are risky. The yield is smaller. Bowman decided that for this crop, he didn't want to pay top dollar for Monsanto's seed. "What I wanted was a cheap source of seed," he says. 
 
 Starting in 1999, he bought some ordinary soybeans from a small grain elevator where local farmers drop off their harvest. "They made sure they didn't sell it as seed. Their ticket said, 'Outbound grain," says Bowman. 
 
 He knew that these beans probably had Monsanto's Roundup Ready gene in them, because that's mainly what farmers plant these days. But Bowman didn't think Monsanto controlled these soybeans anymore, and in any case, he was getting a motley collection of different varieties, hardly a threat to Monsanto's seed business. "I couldn't imagine that they'd give a rat's behind," he snorts. 
 
 Bowman told his neighbors what he was doing. It turned out that Monsanto did, in fact, care. 
 
 "He wanted to use our technology without paying for it," says David Snively, Monsanto's general counsel. 
 
 Monsanto took Bowman to court, and Bowman was ordered to pay Monsanto $84,000 for infringing the company's patent. 
 
 Bowman appealed. To the surprise of many, the highest court in the land agreed to hear his case. "I'm not a-gonna give in! Because I think I've done nothing wrong!" says Bowman. 
 
 His lawyers, who are representing him for free, have come up with a legal argument for why he did nothing wrong. If they succeed in persuading the court, it could pull the rug out from under Monsanto, and some other industries, too. 
 
 Bowman's lawyer, Mark Walters from the firm of Frommer Lawrence and Haug, says there's a very old principle in patent law: If you buy something that's covered by a patent — let's say it's a cell phone — you own it, outright. "You're allowed to put it on Craigslist and sell it, you're allowed to use it for your 'ordinary pursuits of life' is the quote from some of the old cases that we're relying on." 
 
 It's a valuable principle, Walters says. "Imagine how commerce would work if patents owners could come out of nowhere and surprise purchasers and tell them, 'Oh, you need to pay me a royalty, because I own a patent on this thing that you just bought.'" 
 
 So according to this principle of "patent exhaustion," Bowman bought that seed and can do with it what he wants. Patent holders have no right to stop him. 
 
 Monsanto's David Snively, for his part, says this argument completely misses the point. Yes, we can buy an iPhone and do whatever we want with it, "but we're not going to go out and make copies of the iPhone and put Apple out of business," he says. 
 
 That's what Bowman did, says Snively. When he planted this patented seed, he made copies of it. 
 
 In fact, he says, if farmers were allowed to do this with patented seeds, the patents would be worthless. 
 
 A number of industry organizations have come to Monsanto's defense, including the Biotechnology Industry Organization. 
 
 Hans Sauer, deputy general counsel at BIO, says many biotech products are a lot like seeds. "They are easily replicated. They are difficult to make, but once created they are relatively easy to reproduce." The same is true of computer software. 
 
 toggle caption Dan Charles/NPR 
 
 But these are new technologies. Farmers' seeds are old; they're the original self-replicating technology, and for centuries, nobody tried to claim them as intellectual property. 
 
 That's one reason why Monsanto's patents and lawsuits against farmers have stirred up so much anger and received so much attention. 
 
 What's less well known, however, is that the practice of patenting seeds has moved far beyond Monsanto and other biotech companies. 
 
 It's standard practice now even among small companies like Great Heart Seed, in Paris, Ill. 
 
 Great Heart Seed's warehouse is filled to the rafters with white bags of soybean seed. The company sells 45 different varieties in all. Some grow better in the south, others in the north. Most have Monsanto's Roundup resistance genes, while others do not. 
 
 Yet all of these varieties are patented. "Nearly everything out there has a patent on it now," says Nels Kasey, one of the Great Heart's owners. 
 
 Twenty years ago, that wasn't the case. Many seed dealers sold "public" varieties that came from breeders at universities like Iowa State or Purdue. 
 
 Today, most new varieties come from private companies, and even universities acquire patents on most of the varieties that they do release. 
 
 Farmers aren't supposed to save and replant those seeds, either. 
 
 Kasey says, the new system gives soybean breeders and seed companies more profits, and a stronger incentive to create and sell even better plant varieties. "I'm really proud of the varieties that we have today. When I started in this company, you had a handful of varieties. Today, there's more money in it, more profit in it, so I can support 45 lines," he says. 
 
 Those seeds, though, are also more expensive. Soybean seeds have tripled in price over the past 20 years. And a farmer like Bowman who just wants some cheap, generic seeds can't easily find them. 
 
 Bowman can see towering bins filled with soybeans all around southwestern Indiana, but according to the seed companies, he can't plant any of them. 
 
 In fact, after Monsanto took Bowman to court, his search for unrestricted seeds took him all the way to Ohio, one of the very few places in the country where the state still distributes non-patented soybean varieties. 
 
 Bowman acquired some of that seed — a variety called Dennison — and grew it last year. He saved part of his harvest. Those soybeans are now sitting in an old combine in a shed behind his house. 
 
 If the Supreme Court rules against him, Bowman can still use those beans for seed this year.
– Sometimes Goliath beats David—or Vernon, as the case may be. Seventy-six-year-old farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman has lost his Supreme Court battle with Monsanto over his use of patented soybean seeds, the New York Times reports. The court upheld an $84,000 lawsuit brought against Bowman by the agribusiness giant for growing and saving its seeds without paying a fee. Bowman had obtained the seeds from a grain elevator intended for animal feed, and argued that a doctrine called "patent exhaustion" allowed him to do as he pleased with the grain once he had purchased it. This may be true if he wanted to eat the seeds, but Justice Elena Kagan ruled that it does not extend to growing more seeds and replanting them without paying Monsanto for their use. But this case was about more than a few soybeans. Other industries with self-replicating products—from biotechnology to software—were paying close attention to see if their patents would remain safe, USA Today reports. But Kagan warned the outcome of this one case did not necessarily assure their futures. "Our holding today is limited," she wrote. "We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse. In another case, the article's self-replication might occur outside the purchaser’s control. Or it might be a necessary but incidental step in using the item for another purpose."