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Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

Absent patent rights, none of that would matter. Patents are grotesque rent seeking and responsible for all these ills.

Patents are very important for wealth creation. Investors need returns on their investment, otherwise they will not make investments in the research and development necessary to develop the product.

Without the limited time monopoly created by patents, investment cannot be recuperated and there will be no funds available for creating and productizing innovation.

Yet golden rice was made mostly through state funding - patents aren't the only way.

One of the slightly unfortunate things about golden rice (and there are quite a lot of them) is that the state funding it was developed with required them to patent it and sell the patent to the private sector. Though not patenting it would've been of limited help due to the thicket of patents covering the technologies they used.

Why were they required to patent it and sell the patent?

I think the organization funding it (which if I recall correctly was the EU) wanted the university research they were funding to turn into commercial products, and so set a blanket rule requring patenting and attempts at commercial licensing. This is a fairly common view on government-funded research these days unfortunately. There was a published report by the main researcher somewhere with more details.

Well, that was a stupid idea, then. Instead of selling the patents of public research to private monopolies, they should have made them available to everybody.

developed and then sold to a private rent seeking party, don't forget that detail.

There is nothing stopping them from doing the same for other uses. Yet, they don’t.

There are plenty of industries where people invest without a government granted monopoly. If they don't want to invest without this, maybe they shouldn't.

Meanwhile I am under the impression that public funding works better for these sorts of things anyway. So they will pay in their taxes and it will serve the public good.

I wonder if something like the Kickstarter model could be applied to this sort of research.

Novel investment models and the increased accessibility of bioengineering technologies to individuals have the potential to revolutionize the field in the future.

Witness the blossoming fields of biohacking and citizen science.

The fruits of individual, independent experimentation and development may get out in to the wild, if they haven't already, and no patent is likely to stop them.

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