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

(www.technologyreview.com)
167 points thisismytest | 7 comments | 17 Nov 24 03:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.877s | source | bottom
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moralestapia ◴[17 Nov 24 09:43 UTC] No.42163107[source]▶
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.

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1. impossiblefork ◴[17 Nov 24 17:24 UTC] No.42165426[source]▶
The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.

If I don't build it myself and can exploit myself, I get nothing and somebody else gets everything, so why shouldn't I just shut up completely? If I contribute something to the design of nuclear power plants, that the nuclear plant people would never come up with because people from my field, whatever that is, don't look at their stuff, then I obviously can't build my own nuclear power plant to compete with them.

The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.

Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.

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2. mqus ◴[17 Nov 24 18:39 UTC] No.42165964[source]▶
> Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.

... assuming you have the money to defend your patents (or even just find violations). Also, Bigco will just patent adjacent things like production processes and then force your company to trade. How many "small guy" patents were there in the recent years? It just does not fit to our world anymore.

3. j1elo ◴[17 Nov 24 18:59 UTC] No.42166117[source]▶
The fact that Open Source Software exists at all, and is a thriving activity in the world of software development by thousands of people everywhere (not that it doesn't have it's problems) means that no, for lots of people an incentive to share their knowledge isn't needed any more than knowing they are making the world a bit better with their contribution. Not everything is about incentives and money, money, money.
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4. moralestapia ◴[17 Nov 24 19:02 UTC] No.42166148[source]▶
>The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.

99.9999% of people in the world who do not hold rights to a patent and still do what they like disagree.

>The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.

This is one of those scenarios where one cannot really tell if OP is being honest or satirical.

5. Viliam1234 ◴[17 Nov 24 19:44 UTC] No.42166520[source]▶
It probably happens much more frequently that someone thinks about a new thing... and then finds out that someone else got a patent for that already. So you can't even use your own ideas, if someone else independently had the same idea before you. Even if the idea is something really simple, like: "here are two well-known things, but how about using both of them together?"
6. jart ◴[17 Nov 24 20:18 UTC] No.42166823[source]▶
Open source is a thing because it's the most rewarding path. The respect I earn giving my software away is worth a lot more than any money I could hope to earn selling it. It's not possible to sell software. I also don't want to be in the business of managing other people's personal data, and get regulated to death, which makes SaaS not an option. All the paths to making money on your own in software are packed with stress, sociopaths, and landmines with little hope of striking gold. Software by its nature wants to be free, and most of the ways that exist to change that feel unnatural to me. It's much better to just live frugally and build things you love that you give away. Maybe this isn't the way things should be. If we had a sane and just economic system, then maybe I'd be an entrepreneur. I'm simply following incentives, and express no opinion on what's best or how the system ought to be.
7. impossiblefork ◴[17 Nov 24 20:21 UTC] No.42166860[source]▶
Yes, but developing things can involve substantial investment. It's not just a hobby.

If I want to design a new type of pump, we're probably talking about a lot of work, and probably paying people to machine it and maybe paying an expert in another area to do some engineering work on some aspect of it.

The world as a whole is not like software. Furthermore, new things require groups of people getting into them. If we look at deep learning research, how much is from hobbyists?

There is some, from people trying to get PhD student places at groups that demand impressive work and there are some dedicated hobbyists that are part of organisations, but most of the work is commercial or from universities. This is required to get masses of people to spend time on a problem.