Why would anyone bother, even if such terminator genes were present? Your development costs would far exceed the cost of additional licensing, to say nothing of the eventual lawsuits that you would lose. Even with the licensing costs, the benefits of the modified seeds are significant. That's why farmers started using them in the first place.
Are your costs really that high? This was a Kickstarter I participated in several years ago working on plants that glow in the dark. Total cost was ~$484k.
Put $1-2 million together, knock out the terminator genes, profit. How are you going to sue? The plant is no longer they same biological entity Monsanto rights apply to.
Well, first off, there are no terminator genes in use. Second, any licensing agreement would naturally prohibit any effort to modify it to remove them. There's no getting around the fact that you'd be willfully violating your agreement by starting from the licensed seeds. And even if you could manage it somehow (which you can't), you'd run right into the same regulatory process that Monsanto has already gone through. It'd be much more than $484k for that process alone, to say nothing of development costs.
Small farmers could never fund that sort of effort, and large industrialized farms would be sophisticated enough and have access to legal counsel to know better.
