Maybe universities shouldn't be businesses, and what might be a prevailing way to edit genes for quite some time shouldn't be controlled. Perhaps this should be in the commonwealth. I've been to university talks where the presenters declined to answer certain questions because they'd violate the business interests of the school. In other words, the other researchers could not learn about the presenter's discovery and innovation. I think universities should be about advancing and sharing knowledge.
Is "sharing" equivalent to "giving for free the hard work to the private industry"?
Most of the time the system works as intended. The researchers do their research on public money, most of what they do becomes public knowledge through papers, if something noteworthy is found, it's patented and licensed and the university gets its cut. The system kind of fails sometimes at giving the researchers (in plural, not just the tenured rockstar) its due, but many times are the scientists the ones that open an enterprise to work it out.
In this case, it's not that system that has failed, it's that different universities are fighting over who has the right to license it. I have no horse in this race, but this it's probably going to become even more common, as improvements on existing technology become smaller and it's harder to tell who deserves the full credit.
This is 100% paid work, nobody is working for 'free'.
MIT is well known for the second form of patient troll where you look for years of very promising research done by someone else, make minimal change using government funds, and then get to lock things up for 20 years.
Worse there is now a huge incentive to find some other trivial change to get around this patent thus costing the field 100's of times more than their initial 'effort'.
