It's depressing that any entity can have monopolistic ownership over CRISPR.
If someone wins, will they prevent people from using the technique without a hefty licensing fee? How much potential is there for this to slow scientific progress?
If someone wins, will they prevent people from using the technique without a hefty licensing fee? How much potential is there for this to slow scientific progress?
At this point patents need to be replaced with a one time monetary reward system or a stipulation that everyone using the tech needs to pay you 5% royalties for a time duration or something of the sort, but no exclusive rights. With the way the climate is going we can no longer afford these 30 year tech setbacks or we're all screwed.
Or just cut the duration of patents. 20 years made sense back in the 1800s. These days it should probably be more like 7 years.
That ties the duration of a patent directly to how much value it provides to the company over time, which is the rationale for having patents in the first place. A company could only afford to hold onto a patent for as long as it causes the company’s revenue to grow exponentially. Once the patented technology matures and growth plateaus, keeping the patent would become prohibitively expensive.
''' But over time, according to one expert, the patents may lose value due to continued innovations.
“By the time that large scale commercialization occurs, there will probably be supplemental or supplanting technologies,” according to the UC attorney, who asked that his name not be used. '''
So if mid and late-stage companies continue to innovate for e.g. the purpose of productionizing CRISPR, the effect of the original patent will lessen in value. A nice note that there continues to be an incentive for progress in this space.
In such case, how much potential is there for this to slow scientific progress?
Imagine how cheap medical care would be if all the patents on medical imaging equipment expired. If there were no patents the market still provides incentive to innovate as first movers and reputable brands stay competitive. Meanwhile patents allow big slow companies to sit on their rewards and charge high prices with little real innovation. Things would change, sure. Instead of few large investments we would see more frequent smaller investments. But market competition would still work and natural rewards to innovation persist. Only innovation propagates way faster.
Intellectual property restrictions are a disaster in my mind. And sadly most people believe some basic fairy tale that we were told without ever caring to research if that story is even remotely true.
The fact that when prices go down, consumption increases is just basic microeconomics. This is not evidence that removing IP would increase scientific progress or well-being.
One way to approach this would be comparing countries that don't/can't enforce IP protection to countries who do. Of course would need to control for a lot of variables and it wouldn't be a perfect predictor, but already better than pure speculation.
I think you have misunderstood my intent. I am not saying that increased consumption is evidence that we should eliminate patents. I am saying that reduced price of functional 3D printers is a sign of increased innovation. Actually I saw the innovation first hand in the user groups and mailing lists, and I am using the price as an indicator of what I saw.
My point is that we would see more innovation if we eliminated patents and intellectual property restrictions. This would have the effect of lowering prices for things which I think is great, but my point is that patents don’t even do what we are commonly told they do. We are told they increase innovation but in my opinion there was far more innovation in 3D printing once the patents expired.
And it’s no surprise. The only thing a patent actually does is restrict innovation. That is the single function of a patent. The story we are told is that by allowing a government decree to issue monopolies on ideas, there will be more profit in new ideas, leading to a net increase in innovation. But in my opinion this process so significantly restricts follow on innovation that the whole thing ends up being quite counter productive.