Rewarding innovation places external value on property. Their links aren’t contextualize to plant patents---reject them.

What is the value of property? When we speak with Marx (1991, pp 886f) about property as enclosure or with Proudhon (1994, p 13) of property as theft, the underlying assumption is that property is valuable. The scandal of property, here, lies in the redistribution of its value; the fact that it is given to someone and taken from someone else – usually without compensation. Simple as it may seem, the argument is powerful. It challenges the established economic arithmetic of property by politicizing them: someone’s profit is always someone else’s loss. Far beyond its original context of 19th-century political economy, it has been successfully mobilized, from colonialism (Bhandar, 2018) to academia (Bollier, 2002), from music (Seeger, 2004) to medicine (Dickenson, 2017), from housing (Blomley, 2008) to seed (Kloppenburg, 2004). Drawing into question the idea that property simply produces wealth, the juxtaposition of winners and losers, of included and excluded allows us to rethink and criticize the role of various forms of property in economic and public life (Loick, 2023).

Useful as it may be elsewhere, however, the application of this critique to plant patents is not straightforward. The problem begins with an apparent lack of value of the Tomatoes and Broccoli patents, as well as similar applications. As seen in Chapter 4, both plants were strikingly low-tech, almost trivial in nature. What prompted the applicants to seek property protection for something that cost relatively little? Although they were ultimately granted by the EPO, the commercial life of the Broccoli and Tomatoes patents was short and underwhelming (Braun, 2023, p 59). At the same time, it is not clear who these plants should belong to, if not the patent applicants. What is being robbed here, then, and from whom? Why would anyone go to court over these patents, and why was it not the usual suspects – farmers, activists or small breeders? The political-economic critique of property is underlaid by a strong notion of value. Not only does property have value, this value can also be distributed and measured. Moreover, it means something to both those who acquire it and those it is taken from. On an individual level, the distribution The Values of Patents 87 of property thus follows a zero-sum arithmetic: it is either mine or yours, or ours, but I can only increase my share at your expense, and vice versa. On a higher level, however, a different mathematics comes into play: here we can make claims about the unequal distribution of wealth (Piketty, 2014) or the tragedy of the anti-commons, in which we all become poorer (Heller and Eisenberg, 1998; Lametti, 2013; Aboukrat, 2021). In both cases, the weight of this critique derives from the weight of value – value that resides in the property object and can be transferred alongside it without changing. We could also think of value differently. What if it did not lie inside the (literal or metaphorical) fences of the enclosure but outside of it? One alternative location of value could be the mind of the owner – it is she who projects value onto her property, rather than deriving it from inside her possessions. For example, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of appropriation can be read along these lines: here the educated middle class sees different values in a painting than its wealthy owner, who has lent it to a museum. For this reason, both can appropriate the same work of art and give value to it, albeit in very different ways. At the same time, popular and educated values diverge when it comes to art and culture – it takes more time and effort to properly value jazz than pop. Value, here, is subjective in the sense that it resides or at least extends from the appropriating subject. Property means something to its various owners, but it does not mean the same to them. If there is an arithmetic to it, it is that value can only be counted in the plural – values – and not be put in the same equation: ultimately, the market value of a piece of art is not commensurate with its cultural value (Karpik, 2010). But are we to believe that this is how companies think about intellectual property, investments and revenues? Do people come to appreciate the aesthetics of patents that belong to someone else? And what critique of property could we even build on this concept of value? The two theories of value mirror two competing models of property. The political-economic one resembles that of property as an object, which can be measured and transferred. The second one, which we could perhaps call cultural-economic (du Gay and Pryke, 2002; Pratt, 2009), thinks of the value of property as something that ties to subjects rather than objects, or at least detaches more readily from the latter than from the former. It bears some resemblance to the property-as-relation model: urging us to look for value in people and their social position, rather than in the things they own in various ways. Either, however, will mislead us if we seek to understand the problem with native trait patents along its lines. The value of patented plants is neither strictly ‘inside’ the plants or the patents, nor does it reside ‘outside’, in malleable valuations that take place in the minds of their owners. Just like I have criticized both ideas of property earlier in this book, I want to problematize the two contrary notions of value in this chapter. What is 88