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.

> 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.

Well I've been paid most of my career to do (some pretty fundamental at times) R&D without having to patent the output, so I'm not sure that holds. Of course I'm likely in a different country to you, and mine has very explicit grants and tax benefits for R&D, but even when we were partnering with IBM we didn't patent the work I was doing (for a production homomorphic encryption implementation in 2014).

So I dunno. There are other mechanisms that can arise that still get yourself a job and paid without stifling innovation the way patents currently can do today.

The bigger problem is the flat time limit thats not adjusted per-industry. 20 years is a massive amount of time now today in 2024 in a lot of industries. Eons even.