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

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.

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.

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

We won’t know until we try it out.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

> 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.