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To stretch your analogy: "Tennis balls colored for enhanced human recognition." So they're patenting a method to 'improve' CRISPER, in this case 'adapting' it

To stretch your analogy: "Tennis balls colored for enhanced human recognition." So they're patenting a method to 'improve' CRISPER, in this case 'adapting' it for use in humans. To technically use the Harvard / MIT patent you may still need the UCB one. Why this happened from my experience patenting through UCB and dealing with Harvard is that UCB does not have the best patent department when it comes to helping inventors draft patents that are defensible in terms of pushing for sufficiently general language, or including defensive dependent claims (like for use humans) for precluding people patenting specific extensions as Harvard/MIT did in this case. (They just put my patent memo in the appropriate legal format with a few minor modifications.) In contrast, Harvard/MIT as organizations are far more serious about intellectual property and have the legal departments to reflect it.

CalChris 9y ago
Berkeley's IP office is awful. By comparison, Larry Page patented Page Rank. He assigned it to Stanford, Stanford prosecuted it and licensed it back to him, basically for nothing. There's a lot of trust there between student and institution. Furthermore, Stanford owns and defends the patent and no one fucks with Stanford. https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley.
- bsder 9y ago
  > I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley. I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it. Look at how much patents retarded the 3D printing industry, for example. Those advances were very much funded by public money, and those patents basically made 3D printing economically infeasible until they expired. We could have had this revolution 30 years ago--that's a huge loss to us as a society. The foundations of the computer industry rest upon the fact that many things escaped being patented because they came from Berkeley. While most people think of Unix, there was something possibly even more important--the circuit simulator SPICE. The FORTRAN code for Spice2(g6?) became the foundation of the entire VLSI ecosystem that gave us the cheap chips that we all take for granted. It spawned an entire industry. And Berkeley never wanted that to happen again. So they locked down the rewrite into C (Spice3(e2?)) and that code never went anywhere. And even 30 years on, it cost the NGSpice guys an enormous amount of duplicated work.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    > I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US. Any proposal to lop off one pillar needs to come with a plan to replace it or an argument why decimating the US research apparatus is the lesser evil.
    - cowsandmilk 9y ago
      > Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US IP rights are definitely not a pillar of research funding. The majority of universities lose money on their tech transfer offices[1]. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/education/patenting-their-discoveries-does-not-pay-off-for-most-universities-a-study-says.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/education/patenting-their-...
      - CalChris 9y ago
        This. But the majority of these tech transfer offices are more like Berkeley's, jealously guarding their prerogatives rather than promoting students and faculty interests. Stanford's model is that alumni who do well are generous. Also, alumni startups are like all startups, strapped. So unlike Berkeley, which wants their cut upfront, Stanford is patient.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    So keeping with Berkeley examples, should the Regents not have rights (copyright not patent) for BSD? That too became the foundation of the entire ecosystem. But the Regents defended those rights (which they give away for free) from the UNIX System Laboratories lawsuit. You can't defend what you don't have. Full disclosure: my copy of Lions' Commentary was entered as evidence in that lawsuit.
    - bsder 9y ago
      Maybe, but were there other cases where Berkeley helped the ecosystem instead of hurt it? How about elsewhere other than Berkeley? I can point to a handful of technologies where the patents and copyrights got in the way without even thinking hard. I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with technology where the patents/copyrights helped spread it. Unix may be the only one I can come up with.
- ajross 9y ago
  To be fair, CRISPR-based technology looks to be a much, much bigger deal than Page Rank. It's not really much of a stretch to analogize this to the invention of the planar transistor, or the internal combustion engine.
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    Deep breath. ICE and the transistor have been around for decades. Centuries in fact, in the case of the former. It's not even clear that pagerank is being used now; I can almost guarantee you it won't be in 50 years. Given the pace of biotech discovery I suspect CRISPR won't either.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    PCR -- an essential step for all sorts of DNA analysis -- was worth $2B to Roche https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523369/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523369/

CalChris 9y ago

Berkeley's IP office is awful. By comparison, Larry Page patented Page Rank. He assigned it to Stanford, Stanford prosecuted it and licensed it back to him, basically for nothing. There's a lot of trust there between student and institution. Furthermore, Stanford owns and defends the patent and no one fucks with Stanford. https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999 I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley.

bsder 9y ago
> I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley. I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it. Look at how much patents retarded the 3D printing industry, for example. Those advances were very much funded by public money, and those patents basically made 3D printing economically infeasible until they expired. We could have had this revolution 30 years ago--that's a huge loss to us as a society. The foundations of the computer industry rest upon the fact that many things escaped being patented because they came from Berkeley. While most people think of Unix, there was something possibly even more important--the circuit simulator SPICE. The FORTRAN code for Spice2(g6?) became the foundation of the entire VLSI ecosystem that gave us the cheap chips that we all take for granted. It spawned an entire industry. And Berkeley never wanted that to happen again. So they locked down the rewrite into C (Spice3(e2?)) and that code never went anywhere. And even 30 years on, it cost the NGSpice guys an enormous amount of duplicated work.
- jjoonathan 9y ago
  > I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US. Any proposal to lop off one pillar needs to come with a plan to replace it or an argument why decimating the US research apparatus is the lesser evil.
  - cowsandmilk 9y ago
    > Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US IP rights are definitely not a pillar of research funding. The majority of universities lose money on their tech transfer offices[1]. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/education/patenting-their-discoveries-does-not-pay-off-for-most-universities-a-study-says.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/education/patenting-their-...
    - CalChris 9y ago
      This. But the majority of these tech transfer offices are more like Berkeley's, jealously guarding their prerogatives rather than promoting students and faculty interests. Stanford's model is that alumni who do well are generous. Also, alumni startups are like all startups, strapped. So unlike Berkeley, which wants their cut upfront, Stanford is patient.
- CalChris 9y ago
  So keeping with Berkeley examples, should the Regents not have rights (copyright not patent) for BSD? That too became the foundation of the entire ecosystem. But the Regents defended those rights (which they give away for free) from the UNIX System Laboratories lawsuit. You can't defend what you don't have. Full disclosure: my copy of Lions' Commentary was entered as evidence in that lawsuit.
  - bsder 9y ago
    Maybe, but were there other cases where Berkeley helped the ecosystem instead of hurt it? How about elsewhere other than Berkeley? I can point to a handful of technologies where the patents and copyrights got in the way without even thinking hard. I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with technology where the patents/copyrights helped spread it. Unix may be the only one I can come up with.
ajross 9y ago
To be fair, CRISPR-based technology looks to be a much, much bigger deal than Page Rank. It's not really much of a stretch to analogize this to the invention of the planar transistor, or the internal combustion engine.
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  Deep breath. ICE and the transistor have been around for decades. Centuries in fact, in the case of the former. It's not even clear that pagerank is being used now; I can almost guarantee you it won't be in 50 years. Given the pace of biotech discovery I suspect CRISPR won't either.
- x0x0 9y ago
  PCR -- an essential step for all sorts of DNA analysis -- was worth $2B to Roche https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523369/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523369/