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To me, the interesting part was "In 2006, we filed an international patent application for the cultivation of morels in collaboration with a private patent age
by PeterisP 5y ago
To me, the interesting part was
"In 2006, we filed an international patent application for the cultivation of morels in collaboration with a private patent agency. The application described, among other things, two of the most central cultivation principles which are also used today in our fully developed method for the controlled indoor cultivation of black morels, all-year-round. However, shortly after the application was approved, we decided, on the advice of the Danish Patent Directorate, to withdraw the application before it was published worldwide, as in practice it is relatively easy to circumvent a patent of this type. We are therefore now in a position where we have chosen once and for all to keep the key points of our method secret, not least because we are currently considering the commercial possibilities. This is why we are unfortunately unable to provide any more information on the cultivation process than is given on this website."
in combination with their description of how they and many others spent many years unsuccessfully trying to reproduce a 30 year old USA patent that also claimed an ability to cultivate morels indoors.
- foxhop 5y agoMother nature is displeased with purposeful throttling of her feminine energy and so I AM going to reverse engineer. I AM the inoculation, I AM the spore manifest. Grow.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoI surely hope they were privately funded, because being funded by taxpayers money and keeping the results a secret is a really shitty thing to do.
- namdnay 5y agowhy? i'd say that if they're funded by taxpayers the most important thing is for taxpayers to reap their fare share of the profits. if those profits can be kept higher by keeping things secret it's a win for the taxpayer. I'm not sure it would be in the taxpayers' interest to make it easier for private and/or foreign competition against their investment
- rvense 5y agoBut how will the taxpayers ever see any of the profits? It's not like enterprises funded by grants from the government send any of their profits back, unless the government takes actual ownership, which I don't think is very common, at least not anymore. Of course, a successful business will pay taxes and increase economic activity etc. etc., but I don't think that's much of an argument. It absolutely is strange to see government-funded research ending up locked down like this, if that's what it is.
- rout39574 5y agoSo I'll sketch a caricature answer. let's say the patent is released, and a year later every household in the world is thrilled to have black morels every night for dinner, for free, out of their DIY morel cultivation box, and nobody anywhere in the world can ever sell a morel to anyone else again. Have "the taxpayers" seen benefit from this? In terms of currency return on investment, no. But in terms of access to a desirable commodity, heck yes. How much value have they seen? Something like 365 times the price of a meal's worth of mushrooms. The best government research generates benefits this broad.
- Retric 5y agoWealth is not just money in someone’s pocket / taxes paid it’s the actual capital of humanity. Suppose I found a way to make synthetic oil for 1$ per barrel from atmospheric CO2 and published it. Now I can’t capture that wealth and Exxon’s and many other companies stock tanks so it looks like global wealth decreased. However, soon everyone across the globe can now buy more with their money. Lowered transportation costs for potatoes means potatoes cost less in a very real way. This is why patents expire, everyone gets richer when they do.
- askin4it 5y agosomething tells me that the oil companies would sue to claim ownership of the atmospheric CO2 since they spent the money to dig it up. Of course, anyone who paid a carbon tax might have some claim.