this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Patents are incredibly important for R&D as without them, there is no protection of IP
Agree to disagree I guess. I think protecting ideas is an important safeguard that encourages people to take the risk of investing in research.
So many details, how trivial is a patent?
how long?
can you patent discoveries like genes?
You can't patent things that aren't a process or a product, so no you can't patent genes.
Patents take quite a bit of effort to write up if you really want to protect your intellectual property, and their scope is pretty narrow. The patent holder can also license with interested parties if they want.
Genes can be sliced and spliced with methods such as CRISPR. The genetic code that has been artificially transformed by such methods qualifies as a "product". Yes, genes can be patented.
Being first to take what is frequently the next logical step shouldn’t be protected from competition for long enough to make the innovation obsolete. 5 years is more than enough time to establish a brand name and recoup any R&D costs. We can raise entirely new people to adulthood in less time than current patent expirations. If it can easily be undercut by a cheaper alternative, then the “innovation” is unlikely to have been that novel or costly. A more complex innovation would be harder to create and productize which should in itself help limit competition. If you aren’t capable of productizing an innovation, you patented it early just to prevent competitors who were already working on the same innovation from being able to recoup their own costs.
People far too often buy into the “R&D is incredibly expensive” narrative that republicans and big pharma like to perpetuate. R&D isn’t generally as expensive as much as if you aren’t first, you automatically lose everything you invested. Beyond that, R&D is frequently done with the assistance public funding, then snatched away by corporations to prevent competition.
If competition is healthy, and is the self-proclaimed hallmark of capitalism, why are corporations so anti-competitive? Competition IS healthy, but it means that wealth is spread across many rather than the few who control patents, and requires continual innovation if you want to maintain your status as #1 rather than just sitting on a large, frequently purchased, patent portfolio.
The current speed of innovation in AI has shown what things could have been like if less time and money was spent trying to stifle innovation in the name of protecting profits by suing over patents. Every patent is just one more ball and chain shackling society to slow progress for profit.
At least, that’s my opinion.