Bonum Certa Men Certa

CSIRO/CRISPR Monopolies on Life (Through Patent Law) May Soon be Dead

Does changing an organism genetically (by selective breeding or gene editing) give one ownership of anything new of its kind?

Pug



Summary: In an age of patented pigs (EPO) and plants/seeds it's important to keep an eye on the CRISPR patent dispute

OUR previous post covered the Supreme Court's (SCOTUS) upcoming decision on Life Technologies Corp. v Promega Corp. -- a case that can certainly impact patent scope at the USPTO, much like Mayo did.



In related news, CRISPR will be challenged quite soon and the patent microcosm isn't too happy about it. "Open Source Advocates Want CRISPR Technology to Be Free," one patent maximalist wrote (paraphrasing the headline). Well, "Open Source Advocates" are not alone in this and the key question here is patent scope, not cost. As Benjamin Henrion put it, "does it take the form of a computer program?"

Well, patents on life are certainly a step too far. We need to ask ourselves who benefits here. See the new article titled "This Is How the CRISPR Trial Will Determine Our Future" (from Vice):

Arguments in a trial to determine ownership of CRISPR, a gene editing technology, started Tuesday in Virginia. The outcome will determine who gets ownership of an incredibly lucrative and incredibly powerful tool that has the potential to “treat” genetic disease.

Two groups are contending for the editing technology patent: on one side is MIT’s Broad Institute and Harvard University, and on the other is the University of California, Berkeley.

The first patent for this technology was filed in 2012 by University of California, Berkeley, researchers for their work describing how genes could be edited in-vitro, The Scientist reported. Later in 2012, researchers at Harvard and MIT filed a patent for editing genes in eukaryotic cells—like those in a forming baby. The UC Berkeley researchers claimed the second patent violated their patent, and this week’s trial will determine who gets intellectual rights to the technology.


The following article was sent to us by some readers over the weekend:

They lined up early Monday morning for ringside seats at the most sensational scientific showdown in the modern era.

The moment the doors opened, lawyers, reporters and hedge fund investors raced for a spot in the cramped, windowless U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Va.

The tension in the room was electric, as the historic fight for the patent rights to the CRISPR gene editing technology got underway.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary gene editing tool that allows scientists to edit DNA with unparalleled ease and precision. Two prominent public institutions — MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute and University of California Berkeley — are locked in a legal cage match, fighting to privatize CRISPR.

It could be months before a victor emerges, but the winner will walk away with billions of dollars in licensing fees and total control over one of the world's most important scientific discoveries.



The Atlantic too has explained the importance of this case:

Nobody could recall such a long line at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. On Tuesday, more than an hour before the scheduled hearing for a bitterly contested patent dispute over the gene-editing tool CRISPR, a line of lawyers, journalists, and biotech industry execs had snaked through the lobby and across the giant Christmas tree that bedecks government-agency headquarters at this time of the year.

Of course, the dispute over CRISPR is no ordinary patent battle. CRISPR is a potentially revolutionary technique that is so broadly useful across medicine, agriculture, and industry that it could earn the dispute’s winner billions of dollars. Lawyers for the University of California, Berkeley, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard both argue that their scientists had invented CRISPR first.

The hearing was part of something called an interference proceeding—a piece of patent law that is quite literally archaic now. On March 16, 2013, the U.S. patent system switched the way patents are awarded: Previously, a patent was granted to the very first party to invent something; now, a patent simply goes to whoever files a patent application for an invention first. As it happened, Berkeley filed its initial patent just one day before the March 16 switchover. So here we are trying to figure out who invented CRISPR first.


"CSIRO [of CRISPR infamy received] a fair amount of undeserved bad press," IAM wrote (defending CSIRO, obviously!), "some even going so far as to label it a ‘troll’" because it is (see our wiki page about it).

Will this madness finally end, at long last?

More patents do not imply more innovation. The Appeals Court, according to this new article from Mike Masnick, also reminds us that "Patent Infringement Is Good For Competition".

"Of course," Masnick writes, "if you're playing along with the home game, you should already be scratching your head. After all, patents themselves are monopolies. So, if anything, you'd think that any antitrust argument would be focused on the patent holder rather than the patent infringer. But, here, RTI is arguing that the patent infringement itself is a form of an antitrust violation, as it's part of BD's effort to foreclose competition."

Faulty logic. For over a decade we have said the same thing about patents, even back when Microsoft used them to expand its monopoly and assert authority or reign over Novell (and by extension GNU/Linux). If only more people cared to study the real (original) purpose of patents and their impact on competition, a lot of those puff pieces about "innovation" would be long gone.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Datamation, Where I Used to Publish Articles, Appears to Have Been Sold to TechnologyAdvice Only to Become a Slopfarm
I'd prefer to not associate with that site anymore
 
How Software Patents Were Viewed or Their General Status Changed Over Time
A rough summary
We Are Turning 19 in One Month, FSF Turns 40 in 3 Hours (CET)
For our anniversary next month we still have no concrete plans
Patent Docs (or PatentDocs) Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Death of TypePad
Had they gone ahead with an SSG, they'd become a lot more future-proof
USPTO Patent Bubble Already Imploding, After Decades of Artificial Inflation, Entire Offices Close for Good
we can deduce that financial pressures (lack of "demand" for monopolies) play a role
TikTok is Not Harmless (Being CheeTok in the US Will Advance Orange Agenda)
Social control media isn't "fun and games"; it's a digital weapon that lets hostile groups or nations infiltrate others, then turn them against themselves
Andy Farnell and Helen Plews Explain What "Modern" Tech Does to Old People
Imposing terrible tech "religion" on people is not helping them
Tomorrow the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Turns 40 and Its Web Site is Still Slow Due to DDoS by LLM Slop Bots
For an advocacy group, uptime is important (for its message to remain accessible)
Slopwatch: Google News as a Firehose of LLM Slop About "Linux"
Google News is really bad
Links 03/10/2025: "NPR’s Economics Lessons Come With Neoliberal Spin" and Canada Post at Risk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/10/2025: Panic Attacks and Food Adulteration
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2025: Lawyers Caught Using LLM Slop Explain Why They Did It, LibreSSL 4.1.1 and 4.0.1 Released
Links for the day
FSF Board Grew 50% Since Last Year, Has New President, Turns 40 in Two Days
It's a good move for the FSF and - by extension - for software freedom
Links 03/10/2025: Conflicts, Death of TypePad, and TikTok/CheeTok Gives a Boost to Far Right Groups in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 02, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 02, 2025
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Google News, and LinuxSecurity
They carry on polluting the Web with fake articles
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: Kubernetes With FreeBSD and robots.txt
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: 'Open' 'AI' Resorting to Gimmicks and Fake Funding, Europe’s ‘Drone Wall’ Discussed
Links for the day
Links 02/10/2025: Brave Passes 100M Users Milestone, Kodak Selling Its Own Film Again
Links for the day
Michael “Monty” Widenius: It Started in 1983 With Richard Stallman (RMS)
The other co-founder of MySQL is a bit notorious for confronting RMS rather viciously
For the Second Time in a Few Weeks Microsoft Lunduke Makes False Accusations Against Senior Red Hat Staff to Incite a Despicable 'Troll Army'
Nothing that Microsoft Lunduke claims of says can be trusted
su lisa && rm -rf /home/ibm/power
Novell was ruined by another person from IBM, Ronald Hovsepian
A Record Demand at Microsoft: Demand to Cancel
What we're witnessing is a very ungraceful destruction of XBox
Microsoft is Losing Europe
Hence all the "support" and "discount" offers that are limited to Europe
The Free Software Foundation Starts Fund-raising for 40th Anniversary
New pop-up 2-3 days ahead of the 40th anniversary event
Systemd Breaks Networking in Debian and Microsoft Staff Rushes to Make Face-Saving Excuses in LWN
Microsoft's bluca is already there in the comments, his Microsoft money pays for LWN to let him leave comments early
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 01, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 01, 2025
What the End of XBox Will Look Like: a Fiery Crash
XBox is the next Skype. It won't last much longer. Expect many more layoffs.
Richard Stallman is Going to Finland to Give a Talk Next Thursday
A day later he speaks in Sweden
Gemini Links 02/10/2025: SMTP Pipelining and End of ROOPHLOCH 2025
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Plagiarism, Fake Articles, and FUD About Linux
not a day goes by without Google News feeding FUD from slopfarms
Gemini Links 01/10/2025: Chat Control and End of Life
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: Long Covid Risk Reiterated, "Bitcoin Queen" Caught
Links for the day
Links 01/10/2025: EA $55 Billion Deal is Debt and Slop "Raises Vishing Risks"
Links for the day
Bluewashing at Red Hat Means Redundancies
The man who sold Red Hat to IBM meanwhile became a Microsoft Mono booster
After Killing OpenSource.com, IBM ('Red Hat') and OSI Told Us OpenSource.net Would Replace It (But That Didn't Happen)
Now it's time to move on, perhaps tarnishing the "Open Source" label some more (for whatever sponsor wants this)
Linux is Not a Community Project, It's a Wall Street Product
The core goal should be freedom
Bad Actors Abusing the Free Software Community, Vandalising It Using Rogue Politics and Old Tactics
Oil giants have long attempted to do this; now, the digital equivalent of Big Oil does this in technology
Social Control Media Isn't the Future, The Federation or Fediverse Isn't Growing, People's Accounts Vanish for Good
users' accounts will get deleted, not just become inactive
IBM is Failing, This Helps Show Wall Street is Entirely Detached From Actual Commercial Performance
IBM is unable to grow, it's just constantly shrinking
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Clerical Aspects of Publishing and Development
In Free software, the management aspects are considerably reduced
Slopwatch: Fake Articles and Google News Promoting "Linux" Spam or Bot-Generated Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD)
These slopfarms help misplace blame
Third Wave of Microsoft Layoffs in September, This Time Many in Liverpool Affected
Be ready for more waves of layoffs ahead of the so-called "results" in late October