They aren't cancelling the patents because of some ethical medicine-must-be-free reason. They are cancelling them because they are about to be revoked. A sort of, you-can't-fire-me-if-i-quit-first move.
But why? Is there some sort of precedent they are seeking to avoid? Is this just them giving in the towel and looking to avoid further legal fees? Why are they cancelling instead of just letting the process play out?
They might be trying to avoid discovery which voids side agreements concerning confidentiality and possibly collusion / cooperation. Such conditions coming to light might undermine defense of the same / related patents in other jurisdictions.
Hypothetically, and IANAL.
Edit: I'd say the article supports this interpretation.
If the EU patent is revoked in court in EU, the court in other country almost certainly will revoke the equivalent patent in their country because the precedent.
Which other country? Surely you dont mean for EU member states, since the patent would now be cancelled.
For other countries, with different legal systems? The ruling wouldn't be binding as precedent of foreign courts doesn't bind and the law on what makes a valid patent is different. Maybe it looks kind of bad, but so does cancelling your patents right before they are ruled invalid.
> In the US, the Broad Institute has also been selling licenses to use CRISPR.
Including patents owned by MIT, no? It feels like this could use a disclosure and some additional context to understand where the incentives here are. I've walked away feeling like I know less after having read this.
Yeah. While reading the article (having by-passed all those pop up messages first), I had this feeling that dramas are part of every layer of life. I felt a little sad but couldn’t explain why.
Thanks for your clarification!
It works when you are catching up. Japanese companies used the same strategy post-WWII. And a lot of other countries, Japan is just a striking example as it was so visible and quick. “Made in Japan” went from derogatory to a sign of quality in about a generation.
Surprisingly when you are in the lead and others have to catch up, IP protections sound much better.
There are possibly also longer term repercussions from abolishing patents in that people or companies will naturally instead protect themselves via keeping trade secrets instead. This will probably result in some inventions being lost to history instead of being on the public record once the patent expires.
When you are in the lead anything that puts others down is good. That doesn't mean the system needs it to operate. Why would we need a system that protects the country in the lead?
The US industrial revolution was based on it: Samuel "Slater the traitor" memorized designs from a factory he worked at in England and became rich after bringing them to the US.
The Netherlands was the last country in Europe to introduce patent law AFTER Philips stole bulb manufacturing technology from Edison (Philips is now a huge patent holder and actively steals ideas from startups to turn them into patents).
Yep, in 2021 the FBI was opening a new China related investigation every 12 hours. China steals billions of dollars worth of industrial knowledge and secrets from the US every year through industrial espionage.
What defines what is and is not "valid" property? The entire concept of property itself only exists because it's a useful fiction. Prehistoric hunter gatherer societies might have had a loose sense of clan ownership over e.g. hunting grounds but the idea that you could parcel up an acre of land and own it would likely have seemed bizarre. Yet today some people spend their entire waking lives tracking who owns what properties
lets start that to be stolen, the thing needs to be tangible. and property needs to be a tangible thing. and by stealing, preventing from accessing also counts.
Perhaps the Chinese industrialists are rewarding the IP holders the same way video gamers do: with exposure. And after all, we’ve been informed many times: information wants to be free. And we’ve been reminded as well: if they weren’t going to pay in the first place this isn’t revenue lost.
When you don't defend something like a property, profit goes out of building it. And that's the opposite of what we want to do in a capitalist society. Building intellectual property is a positive-sum thing. It makes humanity better. This is something we want to reward, make profitable.
You mean other countries patents, right? Chinese companies are happy to enforce their own IP rights and Chinese courts will enforce foreign patents in some cases.
"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.
The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.
If I don't build it myself and can exploit myself, I get nothing and somebody else gets everything, so why shouldn't I just shut up completely? If I contribute something to the design of nuclear power plants, that the nuclear plant people would never come up with because people from my field, whatever that is, don't look at their stuff, then I obviously can't build my own nuclear power plant to compete with them.
The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
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.
Most companies reach a certain point and engineering teams get messages from lawyers to schedule meetings "to learn about what you're working on". Those meetings are fishing expeditions to try and see what is patentable. Then they repeat this every once in a while.
So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".
That does not match my experience in any company I worked at.
We would solve problems and when we had a decent solution we would discuss with our management whether they thought it was noteworthy enough to start the internal patent application process.
The stage of development at which a patent was pursued depended on how much of a breakthrough it was.
Of course you don't design something "exclusively to patent it". It would make no sense -- a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI.
>a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI
Lol. 99% of patents are cruft. And I'd be wildly surprised if revenue from patent licensing at the companies you worked at was more than a single digit percentage; mayyyyyybeeee Qualcomm but am too lazy atm. to dive through their financial statements.
Patents provide value well beyond whatever royalties you may get from them.
Just think for a moment: why would a for-profit company go through the cost of filing a patent application if they didn't expect to obtain a return? Seriously, give it a moment. Those IP lawyers aren't cheap. It works even if only a small percentage of patents provide the lion's share of the revenue.
Look at any settlements between multinationals and see the role that patents play at the negotiation table, for instance.
Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.
To answer your (rhetorical) question, it is common to file patents for moat-building purposes, i.e. to prevent competition. This is one reason lots of obvious and frivolous patents are filed, and why some companies have cultures that encourage filing as many as possible. There is not necessarily a direct return in the case where you stifle competition, (or threaten to), though it's good for the bottom line.
Alternatively, you have patent trolling which gets a return not through direct use of inventions, but through litigation. It's again not so much that the invention has value but that it interferes with value generation in a way that helps profits. Both cases are abuse of the system, and both cases are common. I'm sure those are the kinds of patents that GP referred to as "cruft."
A patent can only "stifle competition" when the invention has market value. Therefore, the company that filed that patent had produced something valuable in the first place. I argue that they deserve to benefit from it.
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
20+ years and counting.
>Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that. (But a very weak one, tbh).
>What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
On academia, the effect would be negligible. For some business it would matter, of course, but the immense majority of research is publicly funded anyway.
>I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
As much as I like capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money. I would never put their interests over the interests of what's good for society. But to each its own.
The argument of "why would I invest 1B in R&D to develop a drug that can be copied the next day it goes into the market" is valid only on a first, and very shallow, glance. That "1B drug" is actually a several trillion drug which was 99% subsidized by the work of researchers in public institutions. I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich". They're in for the money and if they don't make money, boo hoo, why should I care?
Richard Stallman had it right with the GPL, I wish something similar existed in science. You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets? Go for it! But do it on your own, with a tech tree that belongs to you.
>>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
> 20+ years and counting
I took a moment to search for Morales Tapia in Google Patents and could not find any matches. You do have an impressive resume, though.
> I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich".
Is PCR patented, or was it at some point? Companies constantly pay patent royalties for inventions that they want to use, whether the patent is held by an academic institution or not.
If the inventors of PCR wanted to receive royalties from it, patent law was there to help them achieve just that.
I truly don't understand how somebody who works in research isn't familiar with this process.
> You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets?
Loud YES! And it only recently came off patent. This was really important for thermalcycler companies such as Bio-rad, which probably wouldn't be the name it is without those patents.
At least the patent system is completely broken. At least 90% of the granted patents are bullshit.
I myself am the "inventor" of a nonsense patent. There is prior art and it lacks any significant new step not obvious for anyone trained in the field. At the time I was working in a big European corporation being the market leader of their field. R&D was required to submit all new product features we were working on. The patent department distilled that into patents, even though we told them there is prior art.
Being the market leader we first got it accepted in our home country, then also in EU and US. Only Japan rightfully rejected it. Well, they were our not so successful competitors.
One of the reasons I don't want to work for corporations anymore. I vaguely remember some presentation that corporations have the traits of criminals. Should dig that out again...
I feel like this is missing the why of it all.
They aren't cancelling the patents because of some ethical medicine-must-be-free reason. They are cancelling them because they are about to be revoked. A sort of, you-can't-fire-me-if-i-quit-first move.
But why? Is there some sort of precedent they are seeking to avoid? Is this just them giving in the towel and looking to avoid further legal fees? Why are they cancelling instead of just letting the process play out?
They might be trying to avoid discovery which voids side agreements concerning confidentiality and possibly collusion / cooperation. Such conditions coming to light might undermine defense of the same / related patents in other jurisdictions.
Hypothetically, and IANAL.
Edit: I'd say the article supports this interpretation.
If the EU patent is revoked in court in EU, the court in other country almost certainly will revoke the equivalent patent in their country because the precedent.
Which other country? Surely you dont mean for EU member states, since the patent would now be cancelled.
For other countries, with different legal systems? The ruling wouldn't be binding as precedent of foreign courts doesn't bind and the law on what makes a valid patent is different. Maybe it looks kind of bad, but so does cancelling your patents right before they are ruled invalid.
There are still national patents possible even if you don't need them once you have a European one.
Maybe if the patent was revoked instead of cancelled it has different legal implications for that procedure
> In the US, the Broad Institute has also been selling licenses to use CRISPR.
Including patents owned by MIT, no? It feels like this could use a disclosure and some additional context to understand where the incentives here are. I've walked away feeling like I know less after having read this.
The patents are owned by the Broad, not MIT. The Broad is affiliated with MIT and Harvard, but is independently governed and its IP is its own IP.
Yes, the Broad Institute of MIT is licencing CRISPR patents owned by Broad.
> against Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT
Bear in mind: this article is published by a magazine that belongs to MIT.
Yeah. While reading the article (having by-passed all those pop up messages first), I had this feeling that dramas are part of every layer of life. I felt a little sad but couldn’t explain why. Thanks for your clarification!
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649354
What a sad fucking world. I like what China does in the regard to patents. That is exactly what patents deserve.
It works when you are catching up. Japanese companies used the same strategy post-WWII. And a lot of other countries, Japan is just a striking example as it was so visible and quick. “Made in Japan” went from derogatory to a sign of quality in about a generation.
Surprisingly when you are in the lead and others have to catch up, IP protections sound much better.
There are possibly also longer term repercussions from abolishing patents in that people or companies will naturally instead protect themselves via keeping trade secrets instead. This will probably result in some inventions being lost to history instead of being on the public record once the patent expires.
When you are in the lead anything that puts others down is good. That doesn't mean the system needs it to operate. Why would we need a system that protects the country in the lead?
The US industrial revolution was based on it: Samuel "Slater the traitor" memorized designs from a factory he worked at in England and became rich after bringing them to the US.
If history is any clue, China will aggressively enforce its own patents against poorer countries by 2060 or so.
Several countries already went through this cycle.
...steal them from the Americans?
They learned from the best
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Germany did the same with book rights which helped them to become an industrial and scientific powerhouse.
The Netherlands was the last country in Europe to introduce patent law AFTER Philips stole bulb manufacturing technology from Edison (Philips is now a huge patent holder and actively steals ideas from startups to turn them into patents).
If you can't innovate, steal.
This is the proverbial standing on the shoulders of Giants, which we all do every day
History shows us you copy first to build a foundation, refine and then innovate.
This was Japan's recent-ish narrative arc too, after all.
Many candles can be lit from one.
Not so good for the people selling matches.
Yep, in 2021 the FBI was opening a new China related investigation every 12 hours. China steals billions of dollars worth of industrial knowledge and secrets from the US every year through industrial espionage.
Billions a year seems like a great deal for the US, compared to the benefit it gets from trading with China.
You'd need to be claiming it's worth trillions a year in order to even consider cracking down on it.
Now if only China would share all that stolen knowledge
How's that going
You can't "steal" what wasn't valid property to begin with - even if the law likes to pretend it is valid property.
What defines what is and is not "valid" property? The entire concept of property itself only exists because it's a useful fiction. Prehistoric hunter gatherer societies might have had a loose sense of clan ownership over e.g. hunting grounds but the idea that you could parcel up an acre of land and own it would likely have seemed bizarre. Yet today some people spend their entire waking lives tracking who owns what properties
lets start that to be stolen, the thing needs to be tangible. and property needs to be a tangible thing. and by stealing, preventing from accessing also counts.
No, there's no logical reason for that restriction.
I don't think the world is a net better place with no IP or copyright laws.
I do think the world is a net worse place with IP and copyright laws.
It'll be a better place when IP and copyright laws have reasonable term limits.
Perhaps the Chinese industrialists are rewarding the IP holders the same way video gamers do: with exposure. And after all, we’ve been informed many times: information wants to be free. And we’ve been reminded as well: if they weren’t going to pay in the first place this isn’t revenue lost.
A better world wouldn't need them, but yeah, you're right.
I would have agreed if only nobel difficult to find things were patented.
We won’t know until we try it out.
Public ownership of capital assets has been tried, and tried, and tried... with the same results.
You can pretend to ignore the idea originally coined by Aristotle, but you can't will it into reality.
We do, tangentially. IP laws are enforce differently across the world and across timeperiods, and the differences make for wonderful experiments.
Think of pop music expansion in the Napster era as an example.
Yet successful pop artists are drowning in money.
I have really hard time having sympathy with massively multi-millionaires like Metallica bashing people ripping their stuff.
Even in countries with stronger IP, unknown artists are struggling. So restrictions are hardly an efficient solution
When you don't defend something like a property, profit goes out of building it. And that's the opposite of what we want to do in a capitalist society. Building intellectual property is a positive-sum thing. It makes humanity better. This is something we want to reward, make profitable.
Nonsense, it's anti-competitive. It works against the theoretical benefits of the private economy.
Maintaining monopolies through artificially raising the barier to entry for their competition (patents) is the exact opposite of capitalism.
What would be the world if we hadn't "stolen" so many discoveries from China, specifically where would be the USA (gunpowder, print, et al)
I assure you. We waited 25 years after the invention of gunpowder before co-opting it.
More like 350 years.
I would say not dramatically different, since most of these fundamental discoveries were found by multiple people around the world.
bullshit.
movable type are not used in china until oil based ink and metal casting technology mature in Europe.
> ...steal them from the Americans?
... who stole from the Europeans.
You mean other countries patents, right? Chinese companies are happy to enforce their own IP rights and Chinese courts will enforce foreign patents in some cases.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinese-chipmaker-ymtc-su...
https://www.adhesivesmag.com/articles/101029-medmix-files-pa...
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.
The problem for me is that without patents I have no reason to do anything outside my own area.
If I don't build it myself and can exploit myself, I get nothing and somebody else gets everything, so why shouldn't I just shut up completely? If I contribute something to the design of nuclear power plants, that the nuclear plant people would never come up with because people from my field, whatever that is, don't look at their stuff, then I obviously can't build my own nuclear power plant to compete with them.
The only way to ensure that people have an incentive to invest their time into things outside of the stuff they do to get money is by giving them patents.
Another reason patents are nice is that it's that you get something for your actual contribution. This means that it offers particularly skilled people who aren't rich a chance to actually build a company and have something real.
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.
Most companies reach a certain point and engineering teams get messages from lawyers to schedule meetings "to learn about what you're working on". Those meetings are fishing expeditions to try and see what is patentable. Then they repeat this every once in a while.
So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".
That does not match my experience in any company I worked at.
We would solve problems and when we had a decent solution we would discuss with our management whether they thought it was noteworthy enough to start the internal patent application process.
The stage of development at which a patent was pursued depended on how much of a breakthrough it was.
Of course you don't design something "exclusively to patent it". It would make no sense -- a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI.
>a patent has no real-world value unless the invention itself has a significant expected ROI
Lol. 99% of patents are cruft. And I'd be wildly surprised if revenue from patent licensing at the companies you worked at was more than a single digit percentage; mayyyyyybeeee Qualcomm but am too lazy atm. to dive through their financial statements.
Edit: I was off by 2%. See [1].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenkey/2017/11/13/in-todays...
Patents provide value well beyond whatever royalties you may get from them.
Just think for a moment: why would a for-profit company go through the cost of filing a patent application if they didn't expect to obtain a return? Seriously, give it a moment. Those IP lawyers aren't cheap. It works even if only a small percentage of patents provide the lion's share of the revenue.
Look at any settlements between multinationals and see the role that patents play at the negotiation table, for instance.
Also, re. Qualcomm, it actually makes the majority of its revenue from IP licensing, not its sale of chips.
To answer your (rhetorical) question, it is common to file patents for moat-building purposes, i.e. to prevent competition. This is one reason lots of obvious and frivolous patents are filed, and why some companies have cultures that encourage filing as many as possible. There is not necessarily a direct return in the case where you stifle competition, (or threaten to), though it's good for the bottom line.
Alternatively, you have patent trolling which gets a return not through direct use of inventions, but through litigation. It's again not so much that the invention has value but that it interferes with value generation in a way that helps profits. Both cases are abuse of the system, and both cases are common. I'm sure those are the kinds of patents that GP referred to as "cruft."
A patent can only "stifle competition" when the invention has market value. Therefore, the company that filed that patent had produced something valuable in the first place. I argue that they deserve to benefit from it.
I don't have a problem with suggestions to improve the patent system, such as pedhaps reducing the duration of patents or raising the barrier so that fewer "trivial" patents are granted. But broadly speaking, they do a good job at incentivicing research.
A huge chunk of corporate bio R&D now goes into finding workaround reimplementations for patented publicly funded research.
Just opening public research wouldn't help us get remuneration from overseas use though unfortunately.
And making sure you don’t accidentally violate a patent when you’re just going down the most obvious path
>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
20+ years and counting.
>Do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?
The main incentive is money, patents are seen as a moat to that. (But a very weak one, tbh).
>What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?
On academia, the effect would be negligible. For some business it would matter, of course, but the immense majority of research is publicly funded anyway.
>I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.
As much as I like capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money. I would never put their interests over the interests of what's good for society. But to each its own.
The argument of "why would I invest 1B in R&D to develop a drug that can be copied the next day it goes into the market" is valid only on a first, and very shallow, glance. That "1B drug" is actually a several trillion drug which was 99% subsidized by the work of researchers in public institutions. I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich". They're in for the money and if they don't make money, boo hoo, why should I care?
Richard Stallman had it right with the GPL, I wish something similar existed in science. You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets? Go for it! But do it on your own, with a tech tree that belongs to you.
>>How much experience do you have working in research and filing patents?
> 20+ years and counting
I took a moment to search for Morales Tapia in Google Patents and could not find any matches. You do have an impressive resume, though.
> I don't see companies making the exact same argument the other way around, i.e. "hey I just made a PCR, this is a really cool technique, I should find out who invented this and send them money because they deserve to be rich".
Is PCR patented, or was it at some point? Companies constantly pay patent royalties for inventions that they want to use, whether the patent is held by an academic institution or not.
If the inventors of PCR wanted to receive royalties from it, patent law was there to help them achieve just that.
I truly don't understand how somebody who works in research isn't familiar with this process.
> You (not you-you, the generic you) want to be a dick and close down an open ecosystem of innovation where millions have contributed only to buy yourself a condo and some LEGO sets?
Ew.
> Is PCR patented, or was it at some point?
Loud YES! And it only recently came off patent. This was really important for thermalcycler companies such as Bio-rad, which probably wouldn't be the name it is without those patents.
> As much as I love capitalism, I don't really sympathize with private companies and/or private individuals making money.
As much as I love boxing, I don't really sympathize with athletes smashing each other's heads in.
I don't really get what point you're trying to make, if any.
“private companies and/or private individuals making money” is the core and quintessential foundation of capitalism.
At least the patent system is completely broken. At least 90% of the granted patents are bullshit.
I myself am the "inventor" of a nonsense patent. There is prior art and it lacks any significant new step not obvious for anyone trained in the field. At the time I was working in a big European corporation being the market leader of their field. R&D was required to submit all new product features we were working on. The patent department distilled that into patents, even though we told them there is prior art.
Being the market leader we first got it accepted in our home country, then also in EU and US. Only Japan rightfully rejected it. Well, they were our not so successful competitors.
One of the reasons I don't want to work for corporations anymore. I vaguely remember some presentation that corporations have the traits of criminals. Should dig that out again...