Well, as it turns out, the battle doesn’t always go to the strongest. David still has a few rocks in his arsenal after all. In an article at Shareable (“Setting the Record Straight on the Legality of Seed Libraries,” Aug. 11), Neal Gorenflo, the Sustainable Economies Law Center and Center for a New American Dream report on an impressive job of legal research he did into the language and judicial interpretation of similar statutes and regulations around the country, and finds there are significant potential loopholes to be exploited.

I generally argue, along with C4SS comrade Charles Johnson, that an ounce of circumvention or evasion is worth a pound of working within the system to change the law:

If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform … then … you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics—with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end.

Far more can be achieved, he says, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by “bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life.”

Lobbying against draconian copyright laws like the IP chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and ACTA has done a lot of good, but encryption, proxies and improvements in file-sharing technology have done far more. Before ACTA had even come to a vote, several Firefox extensions became available that can simply bypass domain names seized by the federal government and go straight to their numeric IP address. That’s how people access Wikileaks’ various national sites and mirrors around the world.

In other words, to paraphrase a famous quote, treat the law as damage and route around it.

But sometimes the best way of doing that is by using the law itself as a weapon. The Wobblies and other radical unions have a name for this: “work-to-rule.” Considering the stupidity of the rule-making process in authoritarian hierarchies, there’s no finer way to sabotage an entire company than by obeying workplace rules literally. The same applies to government laws and regulations. A law may have been passed with the obvious intent of protecting proprietary capitalist seed companies from free and open source competition. But regardless of intent, once a policy is put into writing it is limited by its own language. Like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, the destructor is subject to the limitations of the form it’s embodied in.

And as the authors find, the actual language and subsequent judicial interpretation of seed regulations around the country comes in pretty handy as a monkey wrench. Taken literally, virtually all such rules apply at most to the distribution of seed through commercial sale, trade or barter — that is, when a reciprocal exchange of value for value has taken place that involves an explicit or implied contract. Although those who take seed from the Mechanicsburg library are encouraged to return it out of their crops, in order to perpetuate the library, there is no contractual obligation to do so. The only requirement for seed distributors as such in Pennsylvania is to pay a $25 licensing fee. The authors suggest the seed library might do just this, continue to operate as before, and wait for the state (no doubt spurred by the seed companies behind it) to make the next move. And if it does, see what happens when it’s tested in court.

(Shareable has created an open Hackpad for anyone who wants to share the results of their own research into particular state seed regulations).

Of course if this fails and the courts back up the seed companies’ interests, it will be time to take the circumvention a step further (I’m speaking only for myself here, not the authors — they suggest combining the experiment above with lobbying, about which I’m “meh” at best). The file-sharing movement’s response to the shutdown of Napster was to take on a more dispersed, genuinely P2P character, eventually abandoning hosting on fixed servers altogether. With brick-and-mortar seed libraries shut down, organic gardeners might use apps or sharing websites to match up people with matching seed supplies and needs and let them take care of the rest. If the corporate state pushes back hard enough, it might be necessary to relocate the sharing sites to servers in countries outside the DRM Curtain and for seed sharers to deal with one another under cover of encrypted email.

They point to another interesting bit of information. The IRS has acknowledged that time banks are distinct from taxable barter exchanges for much the same reason he argues the time bank is exempt from seed regulations. There is no contractual quid pro quo; although there is an informal “exchange” of favor for favor, there is no legal obligation to return a favor. Now, as the capital goods required to produce a growing share of our consumption needs become smaller and cheaper, and affordable and scalable to individual households or multi-family sharing networks, it follows that a large share of our total production to meet our own subsistence needs will drop out of the cash nexus and off the state’s radar screen, and into self-provisioning through the informal and gift economies. Even on a larger community scale, where some more definite coordination is required through something like Tom Greco’s mutual credit-clearing networks, the system can likely operate under cover of a darknet with transaction costs of enforcement exceeding the benefits.

So technology itself is taking a growing share of our productive lives outside the purview of the corporate-state nexus, and transferring them instead into the realm of voluntary association and mutual aid that Kropotkin, in his Britannica article on Anarchism, set forth as the defining characteristics of anarchy. By seizing on the advantages offered by such technologies, we can evade corporate domination and build the world of our own desires.

Libraries for sharing traditional and heirloom seed varieties are a growing phenomenon nationwide, intended as a way to preserve biodiversity and the collective heritage of many millions of hours of selective breeding against the lockdown a handful of giant agribusiness corporations has imposed on our entire food chain.

A public library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania celebrated Earth Day this year by launching its own seed library project. This didn’t sit well with the state Ag Department, which is investigating the seed library, citing possible violations of the Seed Act of 2004. The department’s duties, under the terms of the Act, include “keeping mislabeled seeds, invasive plant species, cross-pollinated varietals, and poisonous plants out of the state.” Pursuant to that authority, the department told the library, “all seeds had to be tested for purity and germination rates.” A Cumberland County commissioner explained, presumably with a straight face: “Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario. Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge …”

According to the librarian in charge of the seed program,  the library can meet the state’s demands for demonstrating the purity and germination rates of its seeds with a few simple steps: “We can only have current-year seeds … and they have to be store-purchased because those seeds have gone through purity and germination rate testing. People can’t donate their own seeds because we can’t test them as required by the Seed Act. Also, when people contribute, they usually just bring a handful of seeds. The purity and germination rate tests take several hundred seeds, so we don’t even have enough to test.”

So heirloom seed libraries are just fine as long as the seeds are obtained through commercial distributors and no seeds from previous years are involved. Hmmm … If I didn’t know better, I’d think the state regulations were custom tailored to criminalize circumventing corporate agribusiness’s monopoly on the entire food chain. Purely coincidental, I’m sure.

It’s also odd what doesn’t count as one of the forms of “agricultural terrorism” the Seed Act is supposed to protect us against. For all its concerns about mislabeled seeds and cross-pollinated varietals, the Pennsylvania State Agriculture Department is remarkably unconcerned with things like, say, farmers having their heirloom crops contaminated by pollen from Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds (including the so-called “terminator gene,” designed to produce sterile offspring so farmers can’t save seed).

Worse yet, it’s unconcerned with Monstanto’s further terroristic practices, like sending out Pinkerton goons (yeah, those Pinkertons — the armed mercenaries who used to fight pitched battles against striking workers) to harass farmers whose crops are contaminated for “stealing” Monsanto’s patented genetic material. That’s like suing someone you shot for stealing your bullets. Monsanto also threatens and strongarms grocers who label milk with and without recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), on the grounds that free commercial speech is “product disparagement.”

Pennsylvania’s state government carries out actions of its own that some would regard as terroristic, like sending out (at the behalf of chain grocers) agents to set up sting and entrapment operations to shut down Amish farmers’ membership-based food buying clubs, and sending SWAT teams to terrorize sellers of raw milk.

Since their beginnings, the USDA and state departments of agriculture have heavily subsidized, and acted as the enforcement arm of, the corporate agribusiness crime syndicate, terrorizing people who presume to feed themselves without paying tribute to their corporate crime lords. If, as the late Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler said, the US Marines were the overseas strongarm operation for the big US banks, then the USDA and Pennsylvania DA are strongarm operations for Monsanto, Cargill and ADM.