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Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe
- akira2501 2y ago> In the US, the Broad Institute has also been selling licenses to use CRISPR. Including patents owned by MIT, no? It feels like this could use a disclosure and some additional context to understand where the incentives here are. I've walked away feeling like I know less after having read this.
- subroutine 2y agoYes, the Broad Institute of MIT is licencing CRISPR patents owned by Broad.
- cowsandmilk 2y agoThe patents are owned by the Broad, not MIT. The Broad is affiliated with MIT and Harvard, but is independently governed and its IP is its own IP.
- ixaxaar 2y agoWhat a sad fucking world. I like what China does in the regard to patents. That is exactly what patents deserve.
- levocardia 2y ago...steal them from the Americans?
- immibis 2y agoYou can't "steal" what wasn't valid property to begin with - even if the law likes to pretend it is valid property.
- osigurdson 2y agoI don't think the world is a net better place with no IP or copyright laws.
- bmacho 2y agoI do think the world is a net worse place with IP and copyright laws.
- emptiestplace 2y agoA better world wouldn't need them, but yeah, you're right.
- cute_boi 2y agoI would have agreed if only nobel difficult to find things were patented.
- portaouflop 2y agoWe won’t know until we try it out.
- sam_lowry_ 2y agoWe do, tangentially. IP laws are enforce differently across the world and across timeperiods, and the differences make for wonderful experiments. Think of pop music expansion in the Napster era as an example.
- jajko 2y agoYet successful pop artists are drowning in money. I have really hard time having sympathy with massively multi-millionaires like Metallica bashing people ripping their stuff. Even in countries with stronger IP, unknown artists are struggling. So restrictions are hardly an efficient solution
- pxmpxm 2y agoPublic ownership of capital assets has been tried, and tried, and tried... with the same results. You can pretend to ignore the idea originally coined by Aristotle, but you can't will it into reality.
- Grimburger 2y agoMany candles can be lit from one.
- DangitBobby 2y agoNot so good for the people selling matches.
- mattigames 2y agoWhat would be the world if we hadn't "stolen" so many discoveries from China, specifically where would be the USA (gunpowder, print, et al)
- portaouflop 2y agoI would say not dramatically different, since most of these fundamental discoveries were found by multiple people around the world.
- j16sdiz 2y agobullshit. movable type are not used in china until oil based ink and metal casting technology mature in Europe.
- thebeardisred 2y agoI assure you. We waited 25 years after the invention of gunpowder before co-opting it.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoMore like 350 years.
- croes 2y agoThey learned from the best https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur... Germany did the same with book rights which helped them to become an industrial and scientific powerhouse.
- bboygravity 2y agoThe Netherlands was the last country in Europe to introduce patent law AFTER Philips stole bulb manufacturing technology from Edison (Philips is now a huge patent holder and actively steals ideas from startups to turn them into patents).
- Cumpiler69 2y agoIf you can't innovate, steal.
- arcticbull 2y agoHistory shows us you copy first to build a foundation, refine and then innovate. This was Japan's recent-ish narrative arc too, after all.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoThis is the proverbial standing on the shoulders of Giants, which we all do every day
- thayne 2y agoIf you can't innovate, buy (or steal) someone else's invention, and use a government granted monopoly (i.e. patent) to prevent anyone else from innovating further and making a better version. Maybe patents provide an incentive to be innovative, but they also create a barrier to innovating on top of technology that is protected by patents.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoSome people remembering things and going elsewhere and using what they remember seems a little different from copying of millions of documents and schematics and plans.
- colonCapitalDee 2y agoYep, in 2021 the FBI was opening a new China related investigation every 12 hours. China steals billions of dollars worth of industrial knowledge and secrets from the US every year through industrial espionage.
- dmix 2y agoHow's that going
- dmurray 2y agoBillions a year seems like a great deal for the US, compared to the benefit it gets from trading with China. You'd need to be claiming it's worth trillions a year in order to even consider cracking down on it.
- faggotbreath 2y ago[dead]
- kmeisthax 2y agoNow if only China would share all that stolen knowledge
- hulitu 2y ago> ...steal them from the Americans? ... who stole from the Europeans.
- refurb 2y agoYou mean other countries patents, right? Chinese companies are happy to enforce their own IP rights and Chinese courts will enforce foreign patents in some cases. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-sues-micron-alleging-patent-infringement-2023-11-13/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-su... https://www.adhesivesmag.com/articles/101029-medmix-files-patent-infringement-lawsuit-in-china https://www.adhesivesmag.com/articles/101029-medmix-files-pa...
- kergonath 2y agoIt works when you are catching up. Japanese companies used the same strategy post-WWII. And a lot of other countries, Japan is just a striking example as it was so visible and quick. “Made in Japan” went from derogatory to a sign of quality in about a generation. Surprisingly when you are in the lead and others have to catch up, IP protections sound much better.
- vasco 2y agoWhen you are in the lead anything that puts others down is good. That doesn't mean the system needs it to operate. Why would we need a system that protects the country in the lead?
- kergonath 2y agoI am not arguing about morality or justice. I am just saying that it is unlikely to happen, as the countries which value IP protection have the most to lose from abolishing it. The people in these countries might have different feelings but I don’t think this is going to be a deal breaker any time soon either way. Personally, I won’t claim much because I haven’t done any survey. IP protection itself sounds reasonable, but guardrails are needed because the incentives to bullshit are quite strong.
- cma 2y agoThe US industrial revolution was based on it: Samuel "Slater the traitor" memorized designs from a factory he worked at in England and became rich after bringing them to the US.
- dnh44 2y agoThere are possibly also longer term repercussions from abolishing patents in that people or companies will naturally instead protect themselves via keeping trade secrets instead. This will probably result in some inventions being lost to history instead of being on the public record once the patent expires.
- 627467 2y ago
- inglor_cz 2y agoIf history is any clue, China will aggressively enforce its own patents against poorer countries by 2060 or so. Several countries already went through this cycle.
- diego_moita 2y ago> against Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT Bear in mind: this article is published by a magazine that belongs to MIT.
- Bengalilol 2y agoYeah. While reading the article (having by-passed all those pop up messages first), I had this feeling that dramas are part of every layer of life. I felt a little sad but couldn’t explain why. Thanks for your clarification!
- bawolff 2y agoI feel like this is missing the why of it all. They aren't cancelling the patents because of some ethical medicine-must-be-free reason. They are cancelling them because they are about to be revoked. A sort of, you-can't-fire-me-if-i-quit-first move. But why? Is there some sort of precedent they are seeking to avoid? Is this just them giving in the towel and looking to avoid further legal fees? Why are they cancelling instead of just letting the process play out?
- j16sdiz 2y agoIf the EU patent is revoked in court in EU, the court in other country almost certainly will revoke the equivalent patent in their country because the precedent.
- bawolff 2y agoWhich other country? Surely you dont mean for EU member states, since the patent would now be cancelled. For other countries, with different legal systems? The ruling wouldn't be binding as precedent of foreign courts doesn't bind and the law on what makes a valid patent is different. Maybe it looks kind of bad, but so does cancelling your patents right before they are ruled invalid.
- oezi 2y agoThere are still national patents possible even if you don't need them once you have a European one.
- kolinko 2y agoIANAL, but precedents are generally not binding in Europe (Poland at least) - they just serve as an argument. From that perspective it doesn’t matter much if it’s the same or a different country. (may be wrong here)
- m3kw9 2y agoMaybe if the patent was revoked instead of cancelled it has different legal implications for that procedure
- moralestapia 2y agoPatents shouldn't exist at all, IMO. "But they make innovation thrive by providing an incentive to blah blah blah". Not anymore in this day and age. Money comes mostly from the government, anyway, and plenty of really smart researchers would just be happy to put out their stuff out for the public benefit (and already do, btw). Even if they didn't the current patent system ends up giving them like 1% of profits, lol. The business case for "but I want to protect the market I created" can be sufficiently solved with trade secrets and trademarks. Patents sound nice in theory, but in practice they only hinder innovation, the opposite of what they're supposed to do.
- david-gpu 2y agoHow much experience do you have working in research and filing patents? Do you think that companies doing research see a benefit in being able to patent their innovations? I.e. do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research? What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive? From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
- moralestapia 2y ago>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents? 20+ years and counting. >Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research? The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that. (But a very weak one, tbh). >What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive? On academia, the effect would be negligible. For some business it would matter, of course, but the immense majority of research is publicly funded anyway. >I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment. As much as I like capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money. I would never put their interests over the interests of what's good for society. But to each its own. The argument of "why would I invest 1B in R&D to develop a drug that can be copied the next day it goes into the market" is valid only on a first, and very shallow, glance. That "1B drug" is actually a several trillion drug which was 99% subsidized by the work of researchers in public institutions. I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich". They're in for the money and if they don't make money, boo hoo, why should I care? Richard Stallman had it right with the GPL, I wish something similar existed in science. You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets? Go for it! But do it on your own, with a tech tree that belongs to you.
- impish9208 2y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649354
- jpcom 2y agoPartial bribery of the court? Two Nobel Laureates have to cancel their patents that excluded the "obvious" Protospacer Adjacent Motifs (PAMs).
- mediumsmart 2y agoGreat find, that site was missing in my etc/hosts collection.