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Comment by alextheparrot | Hacker News Reader

It is a tragedy that all this time and effort is being spent to create a temporally bounded monopoly which, in the long run, will likely hinder the use and development of CRISPR. Why is it not possible for patents to recognize multiple, independent sources of innovation and to award intellectual ownership of the ideas to all deserving parties?

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> Why is it not possible for patents to recognize multiple, independent sources of innovation and to award intellectual ownership of the ideas to all deserving parties?

Why is a temporary monopoly even necessary here? I've written about this before, but every time I see "patents" mentioned anywhere, I find myself thinking "Do we need this system?"

I asked on HN a while back for good examples of the patent system working as it should. The examples I got back were the Super Soaker guy and a sprinkler system someone's uncle invented -- but that's such peanuts compared to what would be possible if money fighting this case were spent on CRISPR researchers collaborating across organizations instead.

The arguments in defense of patents are so weak and yet so vehement. Delaying the cure for cancer is not a fair exchange for the Super Soaker guy getting rich from artificial scarcity in a child's toy category.

> Why is a temporary monopoly even necessary here? I've written about this before, but every time I see "patents" mentioned anywhere, I find myself thinking "Do we need this system?"

In biotech and medtech no one will invest in your startup, even at the angel level, unless you have a sound IP strategy that includes patents or a very well-considered trade secret plan. The time from discovery to translation and commercialization is long, risky, expensive, and too difficult to predict to permit investment without some sort of period of exclusivity. If someone can clone a product as soon as it is developed and on the market, how could a company recoup development costs?

I've had this conversation before (not with you, but re: this argument) and I think you're right, it's hard to make certain areas of biotech work without having the ability to recoup costs (today handled with a temporary monopoly on the product, keeping gross margins very high).

One answer is "if you abolish patents a lot of science research will have to come from privately or publicly funded research" but this is pretty extreme and would be a tectonic shift in the biotech industry.

I'm not advocating an extreme solution like abolishing patents. But I think the pendulum needs to shift very hard in the other direction re: patents in general. Like, how about not having one court in Texas decide it all? Or "you have to sell the product to keep the patent and you can't just pretend to sell it". Or you can't patent software unless there's a really really good reason (like recouping huge development losses)

I feel like this only underscores the ethical problems of for-profit medicine. The argument, if I understand correctly, is essentially that there's no other way to fund large innovations in medical treatment in a free market than to have a patent system or some kind of artificial exclusivity. To me, this doesn't answer the question of what you're supposed to say to a dying person who can't afford to save their own life when a drug company unfairly sets their prices too high.

When Feng Zhang spoke at my school, it seemed that the use of patents was to prevent unethical modification of human embryos, but that hasn't seemed to deter scientists in countries where IP is not recognized (China).

If that's a genuine ethical issue then patents would be woefully inadequate at preventing it, since they would only provide a time-limited block. To actually fix things you'd need actual regulation, at which point the patent goes back to being bad.

What do you see as the benefits of having a patent system?

Recognition is one thing. In the case of the MIT CRISPR patent, US8697359, that patent recognizes Feng Zhang as the inventor.

The patent also recognizes a LOT of prior art, in particular, publications from UC (A CRISPR Approach to Gene Targeting, ...) and UC patent applications (WO2016011080A3, ...).

Assignment, however, is another thing entirely. That patent has been assigned by Feng Zhang to The Broad Institute (MIT).

https://www.google.com/patents/US8697359

So pretty much the world is already the way you want it to be. Multiple researchers are getting recognized at multiple levels for their work. But know that there's a huge difference between recognition and assignment of ownership. For example, Transmeta did some innovative work in low power x86 emulation. But I don't think that anyone recognizes Intellectual Ventures for their now owning Transmeta's patent portfolio.

My apologies, I believe, after your explanation, that my intent was to use the word "assign" instead of "recognize".

Thanks for taking the time to explain the difference.

So if you are going to have a intellectual property system, then someone has to own that property. That starts with Inventor and then proceeds to Assignee (which never changes) through Legal Events to the current owner.

If you're gonna have a property system then you have to have ownership. You can have multiple Inventors and, failing Assignment to a third party, then each Inventor will have equal rights. Also, you really really have to declare everyone because if you don't they can come in later and claim ownership regardless of later transfers.

So there can be multiple ownership (but VCs are gonna hate that). Also, with the tennis ball vs yellow tennis ball example, there's a 'form' of multiple/conflicting ownership. Berkeley can't manufacture yellow tennis balls and Harvard/MIT can't manufacture tennis balls at all. Unless they both come to the table and agree.

> will likely hinder the use and development of CRISPR.

What is your thought process leading to that conclusion?

Sure, my thought process is as follows:

Hindering the development is the increased caused of licensing from a monopoly instead of a duopoly where they would need to compete. Higher cost of development hinders the use, as we are talking about a tool, wherein its usefulness is linked to its use.

Have you considered that the licenses made need not be broad, and that university licenses include milestone requirements to maintain the license?

I have not put significant thought into if making patents more specific would help the current situation. It could help or it could make relatively trivial derivative works a larger problem. That is actually some of what this article is about, wherein one group describes a tool in one system and another group describes it in a separate, more lucrative system. I'll leave the argument of if translating expression from prokaryotes to eukaryotes is trivial, but I am convinced the translation was significantly easier than the discovery and description of the system in the first place.

Australia's patent on Wi-Fi show that patents held by the education sector can be big money for Universities. But in the article they're talking about how these two schools have already spent tens of millions on this. That's money that could have gone to research, scholarships, grants, and reducing the insanely high tuition fees students have to deal with.

I hate this model of how Universities, instead of seeking to help each other and help the world benefit from open innovation, instead are willing to pay huge legal fees so that one of the two gets a massive payoff while the other is stuck with a large legal bill.

Editas, a biotech company, is funding Broad's legal fees [1]. I had thought that another startup was funding Berkeley's side, but am having trouble finding a source.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/how-battle-lines-over...

There's another good example: H264, and the related audio patents. The Fraunhofer Society has funded years of university research just with the license money from MP4 and similar. Always keep this in mind when choosing between h264 and vp8/vp9.

> Always keep this in mind when choosing between h264 and vp8/vp9.

That's worded like you want to guilt me into approving of the actions of the patent pool. I'd rather not. Give me a link and I'll just donate $2 to them while strongly supporting AV1 over H.264/H.265.

They don't accept donations, they only accept tax funding or money from patent licenses.

Processing donations would be far too much work for such a research organisation.

And if you want to avoid giving away your right to sue for patent infringements, you'll want to avoid VP8/VP9 anyway, as the patent grant is similar to Facebook's and Tesla's patent license, and does end as soon as you sue.

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