Z:gnu-www-ja-copyright-and-globalization--0d1e13-So that's a tremendously impor/en

So that's a tremendously important issue, but it's a totally different issue. There's just one area where an issue arises with patents that is actually similar to these issues of freedom to copy, and that is in the area of agriculture. Because there are certain patented things that can be copies, more or less &mdash; namely, living things. They copy themselves when they reproduce. It's not necessarily exact copying; they re-shuffle the genes. But the fact is, farmers for millennia have been making use of this capacity of the living things they grow to copy themselves. Farming is, basically, copying the things that you grew and you keep copying them every year. When plant and animal varieties get patented, when genes are patented and used in them, the result is that farmers are being prohibited from doing this.