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.

I myself am the "inventor" of a nonsense patent. There is prior art and it lacks any significant new step not obvious for anyone trained in the field. At the time I was working in a big European corporation being the market leader of their field. R&D was required to submit all new product features we were working on. The patent department distilled that into patents, even though we told them there is prior art.

Being the market leader we first got it accepted in our home country, then also in EU and US. Only Japan rightfully rejected it. Well, they were our not so successful competitors.

One of the reasons I don't want to work for corporations anymore. I vaguely remember some presentation that corporations have the traits of criminals. Should dig that out again...