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It looks like video patent licensing agency MPEG LA is targeting the highly promising genome editing techniques of using CRISPR-Cas9. They are proposing to bundle all the relevant patents so that interested parties can rest assured they have all the necessary patents while developing their products. CRISPR-Cas9 is a set of enzymes and RNA guides that enable precise targeting of genomic regions which is quite handy in research and medicine. Note that there already is a litigation in this matter between Broad-Harvard and Berkeley.
From the press release:
"CRISPR's wide range of potential applications in medicine and agriculture, and the steadily increasing volume of intellectual property in the field, point to the need for a one-stop licensing platform to reduce litigation risk and provide efficiency, transparency and predictability to scientists and businesses worldwide," said MPEG LA President and CEO Larry Horn. "Our worldwide licensing infrastructure, trusted reputation for independence, experience, impartiality and results with patent pools, and relationships with industry and academia, including life sciences, position MPEG LA to deliver a licensing solution for the life sciences market as it did with digital video for the consumer electronics market."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday December 08 2016, @08:35AM
> You are essentially telling me that patents are worse than useless.
That's right, they are worse than useless. They are unnatural monopolies on ideas. Costly to enforce. The barriers to invention they raise is very costly to us all.
> The purpose of patents is to disclose inventions.
In exchange for government grant of a monopoly on the ideas. It's a bad deal, for us.
> Do you have evidence that patents encourage secrecy?
That's not among the biggest problem with patents. Chilling effects. The system has encouraged a rush on ideas, rather like the Oklahoma land rush. Thousands of trolls have rushed in and tried to stake claims on anything and everything no matter how obvious, stupid, impossible, useless, counterproductive, and overly broad. The patent office has encouraged this rush by being too lax, approving all kinds of bad patents that should not have been approved. There is practically zero sharing. It's an idiotic winner-take-all system in which 2nd place is no better than last. It provokes fights. It has no provision to handle the anti-social move of locking an invention away so that the owners can continue to gouge the public for an inferior but necessary product that they manufacture.