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

"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.

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.

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.

> 20+ years and counting

I took a moment to search for Morales Tapia in Google Patents and could not find any matches. You do have an impressive resume, though.

> 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".

Is PCR patented, or was it at some point? Companies constantly pay patent royalties for inventions that they want to use, whether the patent is held by an academic institution or not.

If the inventors of PCR wanted to receive royalties from it, patent law was there to help them achieve just that.

I truly don't understand how somebody who works in research isn't familiar with this process.

> 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?

Ew.

Loud YES! And it only recently came off patent. This was really important for thermalcycler companies such as Bio-rad, which probably wouldn't be the name it is without those patents.

And it is not like patents prevent academics from doing research, either, as there are academic exceptions. In fact, the patent filing process forces the inventors to disclose how their invention works in detail, which makes it easier for academics to build on those ideas if they want to. It's only commercial applications that are really bound by IP licensing agreements, to my knowledge.