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

Patents 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.

How 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.

Most companies reach a certain point and engineering teams get messages from lawyers to schedule meetings "to learn about what you're working on". Those meetings are fishing expeditions to try and see what is patentable. Then they repeat this every once in a while.

So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".

That does not match my experience in any company I worked at.

We would solve problems and when we had a decent solution we would discuss with our management whether they thought it was noteworthy enough to start the internal patent application process.

The stage of development at which a patent was pursued depended on how much of a breakthrough it was.

Of course you don't design something "exclusively to patent it". It would make no sense -- a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI.

>a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI

Lol. 99% of patents are cruft. And I'd be wildly surprised if revenue from patent licensing at the companies you worked at was more than a single digit percentage; mayyyyyybeeee Qualcomm but am too lazy atm. to dive through their financial statements.

Edit: I was off by 2%. See [1].

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/2017/11/13/in-todays...

Patents provide value well beyond whatever royalties you may get from them.

Just think for a moment: why would a for-profit company go through the cost of filing a patent application if they didn't expect to obtain a return? Seriously, give it a moment. Those IP lawyers aren't cheap. It works even if only a small percentage of patents provide the lion's share of the revenue.

Look at any settlements between multinationals and see the role that patents play at the negotiation table, for instance.

Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.

To answer your (rhetorical) question, it is common to file patents for moat-building purposes, i.e. to prevent competition. This is one reason lots of obvious and frivolous patents are filed, and why some companies have cultures that encourage filing as many as possible. There is not necessarily a direct return in the case where you stifle competition, (or threaten to), though it's good for the bottom line.

Alternatively, you have patent trolling which gets a return not through direct use of inventions, but through litigation. It's again not so much that the invention has value but that it interferes with value generation in a way that helps profits. Both cases are abuse of the system, and both cases are common. I'm sure those are the kinds of patents that GP referred to as "cruft."