Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe

What a sad fucking world. I like what China does in the regard to patents. That is exactly what patents deserve.

...steal them from the Americans?

You can't "steal" what wasn't valid property to begin with - even if the law likes to pretend it is valid property.

I don't think the world is a net better place with no IP or copyright laws.

I do think the world is a net worse place with IP and copyright laws.

A better world wouldn't need them, but yeah, you're right.

Many candles can be lit from one.

I would have agreed if only nobel difficult to find things were patented.

When you don't defend something like a property, profit goes out of building it. And that's the opposite of what we want to do in a capitalist society. Building intellectual property is a positive-sum thing. It makes humanity better. This is something we want to reward, make profitable.

You 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-su...

https://www.adhesivesmag.com/articles/101029-medmix-files-pa...

Nonsense, it's anti-competitive. It works against the theoretical benefits of the private economy.

What would be the world if we hadn't "stolen" so many discoveries from China, specifically where would be the USA (gunpowder, print, et al)

I would say not dramatically different, since most of these fundamental discoveries were found by multiple people around the world.

We won’t know until we try it out.

They learned from the best

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.

Yep, 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.

Perhaps the Chinese industrialists are rewarding the IP holders the same way video gamers do: with exposure. And after all, we’ve been informed many times: information wants to be free. And we’ve been reminded as well: if they weren’t going to pay in the first place this isn’t revenue lost.

The 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).

What defines what is and is not "valid" property? The entire concept of property itself only exists because it's a useful fiction. Prehistoric hunter gatherer societies might have had a loose sense of clan ownership over e.g. hunting grounds but the idea that you could parcel up an acre of land and own it would likely have seemed bizarre. Yet today some people spend their entire waking lives tracking who owns what properties

Maintaining monopolies through artificially raising the barier to entry for their competition (patents) is the exact opposite of capitalism.

lets start that to be stolen, the thing needs to be tangible. and property needs to be a tangible thing. and by stealing, preventing from accessing also counts.

bullshit.

movable type are not used in china until oil based ink and metal casting technology mature in Europe.

How's that going

I assure you. We waited 25 years after the invention of gunpowder before co-opting it.

Billions 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.

If you can't innovate, steal.

We 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.

History shows us you copy first to build a foundation, refine and then innovate.

This was Japan's recent-ish narrative arc too, after all.

More like 350 years.

Yet 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

It 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.

When 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?

It'll be a better place when IP and copyright laws have reasonable term limits.

> ...steal them from the Americans?

... who stole from the Europeans.

The 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.

Now if only China would share all that stolen knowledge

Public 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.

If 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.

This is the proverbial standing on the shoulders of Giants, which we all do every day

Not so good for the people selling matches.

No, there's no logical reason for that restriction.

There 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.

Some 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.

Wasn't this derogatory vs. quality more of a stereotype though?

Japan has long history of craftsmanship so I imagine they made high quality stuff for a while.

I 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.

There may be a net benefit from some class of patents, but that's very far from clear.

Drugs and chemical processes are the most obvious candidates. And there's some heavy empirical evidence against the later.

In my experience it’s usually a reference to the difference between pre- and post-WWII Japan.

Once Deming made it over there and sold the idea of statistical quality control they were at the forefront of manufacturing rather than a laughingstock.

You do not like efficiency??

what's the difference? that they didn't use paper for schematics? it's the same process, isn't it?

If 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.

There is a huge difference between all capital assets being public, and not considering ideas to be a capital asset.

Up until mid-1970s Japanese goods were about where Aliexpress is now.

Yeah, trade secrets will become bigger, so? You need to expose the product. Or the process, things get reverse engineer. Overall, the net effect will likely be positive if monopolies end.

> Wasn't this derogatory vs. quality more of a stereotype though?

Yes, but not entirely. Japanese cameras, for example, were basically cheap ripoffs of German models up until after WW2. Japanese motorbikes were infamous for being cheap and flimsy in the 1970s to 1980s. Same for the cars, being a Toyota was not a good thing before the 1990s. Sure, there was some inertia and this kind of reputation takes time to shake off. The changes in product quality were gradual and a bit earlier than the changes in perception by the market (the Western European one, at least).

> Japan has long history of craftsmanship so I imagine they made high quality stuff for a while.

So does China. The main thing is that the exports we see are the stuff made cheaply in factories, not the bespoke items crafted from raw materials by an artisan in their workshop. Japanese companies are happy to build on the cheap as well.

And Chinese factories can make very high quality goods, if they put some effort in quality control. I am willing to bet that at some point they’ll be undercut and will go upmarket for a larger and larger slice of their exports.

How useful are patent records for rebuilding technology?

I imagine that patent is not a recipe, but description used identify infringements.

If goal is only to identify infringements, then I would leave bunch of stuff out of patents. (Later I could fill new patent for same thing just describe those parts that were left out in the first one)

Opposite of free market. Capitalism = private ownership and profit from ownership.

In theory the patent is supposed to describe everything necessary to reproduce the invention. If something is left out that is critical then there isn't really any invention there and the patent shouldn't be awarded. I understand that in practice some patents are written in such a way to make this difficult.

Yes, I guess it is very efficient to not need to spend any money on R&D, and just steal from those who do spend the money.

Will anyone spend money on R&D in this efficient world when the result is you just go out of business because you can't compete against anyone who does?

I'd say it is the same difference between a police officer remembering a license plate for the getaway car of a bank robbery, and having pervasive automatic surveillance tracking everywhere everyone goes.

> What defines what is and is not "valid" property?

There are several ways to answer this provided it isn't rhetorical.

One approach is to examine how society collectively decides what counts as property. These decisions aren’t neutral or universal — they’re shaped by the power and interests of those who benefit most from them. I hope it's clear that there is a contradiction present between: "property is universal" and those who benefit most from property being true are those with the most property.

Historically, the ruling class has established what counts as “valid” property by embedding their preferences into law and enforcing them through two major systems: ideology and force. You and I are taught to accept these definitions through societal institutions like schools, media, and legal systems. These institutions present ideas like patents or private property as natural or universal truths, making alternative ways of thinking seem unrealistic or unthinkable. For instance, when people say things like, “Patents protect natural rights,” or “Every other system has failed,” they’re reflecting this conditioning — whether or not they personally benefit from it.

The concept of property is enforced through systems of control, like courts, fines, and even imprisonment. If someone challenges the validity of a patent, they stand to face financial penalties or legal repercussions. The idea of “valid” property isn’t just a belief — it’s something actively maintained through both persuasion and coercion.

Ultimately, those who gain the most from these systems (like corporations or wealthy individuals) have the power to shape both the ideas we accept and the rules we follow. They turn their interests into societal norms through a feedback loop of belief and enforcement. The system sustains itself by creating the reality it envisions - "hyperstition" is where our collective belief makes something real.