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Comment by 4258HzG | Hacker News Reader

To stretch your analogy: "Tennis balls colored for enhanced human recognition." So they're patenting a method to 'improve' CRISPER, in this case 'adapting' it for use in humans. To technically use the Harvard / MIT patent you may still need the UCB one.

Why this happened from my experience patenting through UCB and dealing with Harvard is that UCB does not have the best patent department when it comes to helping inventors draft patents that are defensible in terms of pushing for sufficiently general language, or including defensive dependent claims (like for use humans) for precluding people patenting specific extensions as Harvard/MIT did in this case. (They just put my patent memo in the appropriate legal format with a few minor modifications.) In contrast, Harvard/MIT as organizations are far more serious about intellectual property and have the legal departments to reflect it.

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Berkeley's IP office is awful.

By comparison, Larry Page patented Page Rank. He assigned it to Stanford, Stanford prosecuted it and licensed it back to him, basically for nothing. There's a lot of trust there between student and institution. Furthermore, Stanford owns and defends the patent and no one fucks with Stanford.

https://www.google.com/patents/US6285999

I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley.

> I say this as a Berkeley grad. University IP departments should be more like Stanford and less like Berkeley.

I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it.

Look at how much patents retarded the 3D printing industry, for example. Those advances were very much funded by public money, and those patents basically made 3D printing economically infeasible until they expired. We could have had this revolution 30 years ago--that's a huge loss to us as a society.

The foundations of the computer industry rest upon the fact that many things escaped being patented because they came from Berkeley. While most people think of Unix, there was something possibly even more important--the circuit simulator SPICE.

The FORTRAN code for Spice2(g6?) became the foundation of the entire VLSI ecosystem that gave us the cheap chips that we all take for granted. It spawned an entire industry.

And Berkeley never wanted that to happen again. So they locked down the rewrite into C (Spice3(e2?)) and that code never went anywhere. And even 30 years on, it cost the NGSpice guys an enormous amount of duplicated work.

> I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented.

Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US. Any proposal to lop off one pillar needs to come with a plan to replace it or an argument why decimating the US research apparatus is the lesser evil.

> Grants, green cards, and IP rights are the three pillars of research funding in the US

IP rights are definitely not a pillar of research funding. The majority of universities lose money on their tech transfer offices[1].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/education/patenting-their-...

This. But the majority of these tech transfer offices are more like Berkeley's, jealously guarding their prerogatives rather than promoting students and faculty interests.

Stanford's model is that alumni who do well are generous. Also, alumni startups are like all startups, strapped. So unlike Berkeley, which wants their cut upfront, Stanford is patient.

So keeping with Berkeley examples, should the Regents not have rights (copyright not patent) for BSD? That too became the foundation of the entire ecosystem. But the Regents defended those rights (which they give away for free) from the UNIX System Laboratories lawsuit. You can't defend what you don't have.

Full disclosure: my copy of Lions' Commentary was entered as evidence in that lawsuit.

Maybe, but were there other cases where Berkeley helped the ecosystem instead of hurt it? How about elsewhere other than Berkeley?

I can point to a handful of technologies where the patents and copyrights got in the way without even thinking hard. I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with technology where the patents/copyrights helped spread it. Unix may be the only one I can come up with.

So you think that patents and copyrights get in the way of the ecosystem. But what do you think motivates developers to invent in the first place? Without that motivation where would the ecosystem be?

Famous case is that when Japan opened up to the world, they sent ambassadors out to learn what was going on on the outside. One said, “we have looked about us to see what nations are the greatest, so that we can be like them. We said ‘what is it that makes the United States such a great nation?’ and we investigated and found that it was patents, and we will have patents.”

http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/

> But what do you think motivates developers to invent in the first place? Without that motivation where would the ecosystem be?

Developers develop because they feel a need to develop. No more, no less. Painting, music, writing, etc. are similar.

Creators create because they must create.

I'd say open source invalidates the assumption that there would be no advancement without patents.

All the while the evidence has piled up that patents actually don't promote advancement anymore: https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044_print.html

> http://www.iphalloffame.com/korekiyo_takahashi/

Interesting, but I would point out that he was making those statements at a point in time where the US was literally ripping off anything and everything in the UK that was patented (aka: what China has currently been doing to the US).

That time period is, in fact, a prime example of advancement without strong patent protections.

The original Ethernet patent was an example of this. The license fees were low - $1000 [0] and it became a de facto standard. Token Ring was a competing network technology with considerably higher license fees [1]. Patent owners for subsequent Ethernet standards started out with similar terms but then started shaking down licensees [2].

The Bell Labs transistor patent may be another example. The initial license fees were $25k [3].

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=qTkEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA52&ots=...

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=OFCXnqlSFKwC&lpg=PA709&dq=...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2008/01/ftc-c...

[3] (pdf) http://repository.jmls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1175&...

I agree with your principle ('publicly funded work shouldn't be patented'), but that's not the legal framework we have, and it hasn't been that way since Bayh-Dole was passed in 1980 [1].

Until that act is reversed, it's foolish for UC to not behave more like Stanford.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Dole_Act

Note that prior to the Bayh-Dole Act, publicly-funded IP was assigned to the government, where 95% of it lay unused.

It seems like it would be a good idea to have some kind of sub-patent, time-limited exclusivity granularity. For purposes of saying "I recognize that you are providing value to me as the patent holder by doing something with the patent that may not merit its own patent, but should nonetheless be encouraged (for my own gain and yours)".

Like a sub-piggyback patent that automatically includes licensing of the parent.

Given current IP law, I think the more relevant question is how public Universities should handle their patents (e.g. for public use, for a nominal license fee, or profit) and not if they should patent.

A non-existant or poorly executed patent allows for anyone to follow up, as MIT/Harvard in this case, and effectively patent minor extensions to the idea and still lock it up. Even if a public university wants their inventions to be free to the public, they need to properly patent it if it is going to stay available for public use. Eg. BSD style licenses for patents.

> I disagree. And I think that anything funded with public grant money should be barred from being patented. If you want to patent it, you should have to fund it privately and take all the risk. If there is even a whiff of public money, you shouldn't get to patent it.

What's the economic logic behind this? In these situations, the government is just another early stage investor. If it demands terms that are too onerous, the good projects will go somewhere else, leaving the government with the ones that don't have better options. Or, you'll basically make government funded R&D all into dead ends, because nobody is going to bother to spend the money taking it from lab projects into commercialization.

> If it demands terms that are too onerous, the good projects will go somewhere else, leaving the government with the ones that don't have better options. Or, you'll basically make government funded R&D all into dead ends, because nobody is going to bother to spend the money taking it from lab projects into commercialization.

Yet, somehow, we had almost a century of research and funding that included seminal things like radio, construction design and analysis, gigantic tools, tubes, transistors, etc. long before Bayh-Dole.

To be fair, I don't WANT government funding going into something that will make somebody money tomorrow. That's not what government research is supposed to be for, and it already has distorted "research" institutions into "funding" institutions where professors keep their best ideas close to the chest to go build a startup with. Besides, lots of people are willing to throw money at what looks immediately promising incrementally.

Nobody remembers them.

What everybody remembers are those rare times when funding flowed into things without any apparent use that magically transformed the entire technological landscape.

To be fair, CRISPR-based technology looks to be a much, much bigger deal than Page Rank. It's not really much of a stretch to analogize this to the invention of the planar transistor, or the internal combustion engine.

Deep breath. ICE and the transistor have been around for decades. Centuries in fact, in the case of the former. It's not even clear that pagerank is being used now; I can almost guarantee you it won't be in 50 years. Given the pace of biotech discovery I suspect CRISPR won't either.

PCR -- an essential step for all sorts of DNA analysis -- was worth $2B to Roche

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523369/

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