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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?

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.

What a sad fucking world. I like what China does in the regard to patents. That is exactly what patents deserve.

> 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.

> 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.

Partial bribery of the court? Two Nobel Laureates have to cancel their patents that excluded the "obvious" Protospacer Adjacent Motifs (PAMs).

Great find, that site was missing in my etc/hosts collection.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649354