4. Petitioner also contends (Pet. 9, 17-18) that the court of appeals’ decision will eliminate commodity soybeans as a low-cost alternative for second-crop plantings, and will otherwise alter traditional farming practices. For at least two reasons, those policy consid erations do not warrant this Court’s review.
First, Congress is better equipped than is this Court to weigh petitioner’s concerns against the countervailing considerations that support continuing patent protection in this context. If petitioner’s view were adopted, the first authorized sale of a single Roundup Ready soybean would extinguish all of respondent’s patent rights to that soybean and to its progeny. Although respondent might still have contractual remedies against persons with whom it is in privity, any patent protection “would effectively be lost as soon as the first generation of the product was introduced into the market.” Br. in Opp. 3; see Scruggs, 459 F.3d at 1336 (“Applying the first sale doctrine to subsequent generations of self-replicating technology would eviscerate the rights of the patent holder.”). The incentive to invest in innovation and re- search might well be diminished if the patent term for genetically modified crops was effectively reduced from 20 years to a single year or even a single growing sea- son. Cf. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 307 (1980) (“The patent laws promote * * * progress by offering inventors exclusive rights for a limited period as an incentive for their inventiveness and research ef- forts.”). Congress is better positioned to weigh the in- terests of biotechnology firms, agricultural workers, and the public, as it presumably did in crafting a limited seed-saving exemption to the PVPA.
Second, the crux of petitioner’s theory is that, not- withstanding respondent’s right to exclude others from “making” Roundup Ready seed, persons who have acquired such seed through an authorized sale may law- fully create new generations by exploiting the seeds’ self-replicating properties. Very few judicial decisions have applied patent-exhaustion principles to self- replicating technologies, and the limited case law in this area has centered on soybeans. If this Court granted certiorari, however, its decision could also affect the en- forcement of patents for man-made cell lines, DNA mol- ecules, nanotechnologies, organic computers, and other technologies that involve self-replicating features. The Court should allow the case law to develop further be- fore considering whether to adopt a more restrictive definition of “making” that could have unforeseen con- sequences for other present and future self-replicating technologies. Cf. Bilski v. Kappos, 130 S. Ct. 3218, 3227 (2010) (recognizing that “[t]echnology and other innova- tions progress in unexpected ways”).