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Encoding DNA as Music for Copyrighting?
superposed writes "A Silicon Valley executive is proposing that biotech companies could improve on the U.S.'s 20-year patent protection for DNA sequences by encoding them as digital music files (Lame Free Registration required) and using copyright protection, which can last up to 100 years. Right now this is just a suggestion, and for what it's worth, the original author of some of the DNA-to-music software thinks its a bad idea. But it's still disturbing somehow."
...It'll still sound better than the Backstreet Boys..
Would the RIAA try and make human cloning (well, copying the 'music') illegal?
Do rocks play music files? Because if things keep going the way they are , thats all that will be left.
To get copyrightprotection it must be an original and creative work.
There's nothing creative about a DNA secuence, it's just a statement of fact, no matter in what form it is encoded.
IANAL but I don't think that will work.
I can take a picture of a mountain - and I can even argue copyright on the picture - but just because I took a picture of a mountain doesn't mean I own it or it's likeness.
I wonder if these MP3s will be traded on Napster, Gnutella, etc... And what if someone figured out how to synthesize stuff from the songs.
Imagine hearing "Chromosome 10, #452" by the Scientists (of UIUC).
What will those nasty sections of DNA sound like? OTOH, what do green eyes sound like?
Maybe I'll be able to hear my own song one day, but until then I'll just have to dream.
P2P DNA Sharing :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Encoding DNA into music isn't that hard. Here's a sample of my DNA, in music format:
G, A, C, A, T, T, T, G, A, C, A, T.
(and that's just a small part of my lameness gene)
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
I think this is just another demonstration of abuse of laws for personal gain.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
You should be able to copyright sequences you made entirely yourself. But if you use any part of any other DNA sequence that already exists in the world, you should be accused of plagiarizing God's work. The work of God should not be copyrighted.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Sounds like a wonderful idea.
Actually, ANY abuse of the copyright/patent/IP system leading to monopoly trasfers looks a wonderful idea to me.
The "napster effect" is giving rise to a backlash against consumer rights, if the big guys abuse IP laws enough it will lead faster to a back-backlash against IP. Actually, if my business were based on patents/IP I'd fight tooth and nail against the people abusing them, for fear of losing protection....
rendering DNA into Music does not produce art.
If there is copy of this as MUSIC, then there should be no protection for the Music in another Artform.
Example: projecting the Music onto the backdrop of a Theater production.
Besides our understandinfg of DNA is sufficiently small that you can not consider the design of living creatures an art form at this time. When it does, then I can consider giving them the copyright.
I consider the body of work seen in the Australian Marsupials to be fantastic.
DNA is merely the notation of the configuration of the Life Form.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I think it's pretty comical that so many people think that music and other creative works need greater copyright lifetimes than DNA.
While I don't like psychoanalyzing dead people, I really doubt Walt Disney (the man) would have felt that Mikey Mouse needed such additional protection per the Sonny Bono Law.
When the concept of copyright was first hammered out, people created for other people. I think we've gotten away from that in the "mainstream" sector. Works aren't made for people anymore, they're made for "interest groups" and "demographic sectors". I'm still hopefull that this mentality is a "flash in the pan" in the global scheme of things, but sometimes I get nervous.
RFC2119
Cool hack! Will they also start suing (the heirs of) Paul McCartney if it retrospectively turns out that some of his songs encode for some expensive gene?
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
Competition is one of the keys to innovation and as such IP laws that
restrict such competition to long timelines will have to compete with
licenses that don't.
Ever hear of GNU?
How about Lawrence Lessigs efforts to make a variety of such Licenses
available for free use? Of which I suspect they can be modified for any
type of IP, even non-computer related...
Point being, although there may be these really stupid "Cannot" based
laws who's time lines continue to get extended in what amounts to
infinity, there is the law of license that can over rule.
I mean if you can sign away your (US citizen constitutional rights) right
to free speech in such things as NDAs then the ability to create licenses
that get around the problems created by law makers who have lost touch
with the original intent of the creation of IP laws....so as to more so
or better fit the originators..
The IP laws should be "Can" Based. That's where Licenses like GPL come
in. (exception in GPL is that you cannot take without giving back - and
that is the exception to prove the rule valid. For it is so bad to say you
cannot be unfair?)
Perhaps it's time more people start realizing there is a choice with which
laws they want to be influenced by. By supporting their choice openly.
If it is my DNA, then no one else has a right to patent it. Besides, patents are supposed to be granted for inventions and processes, not discoveries.
If a program is used to generate music, and the situation is further complicated by seeding the program with a DNA sequence, who has actually composed the music, and who, therefore is actually entitled to receive a copyright for it?
The author of the program? The person or plant/animal from whom the DNA sequence was extracted? Or the person who merely loaded the DNA info and clicked the button?
Numerous programs have been created that create music -- some in the style of a specified composer. It might be worth finding how the copyright issue were handled on the output of these programs.
In either case, it strikes me as clearly nonsensicle for the user of an application to be permitted to copyright the output of a program where the program's output is determined without consequential input from the user, and in this case, the user is not performing any creative act by feeding in an already predetermined string of data which is found in nature.
My feeling would be that if anyone has a right to the copyright of the output of this program, it would be the program's author, not the user.
I have a degree in music theory and composition, and this sort of arrangement is not very much different than much of the "avant guard" work produced in the 20th century -- i.e. composers like Stockhausen, Babbit, Reich, Cage, et alii, often were more concerned with the *methodology* they constructed which then generated the musical work, than the actually work itself.
In other words, in this sort of "post-modern" art music, the act of composing became more about the creation of a methodology (or algorithm) to create a work of art in liue of a common practice, and allowing the resulting work to be partially or totally controlled by the process originally established -- like setting up a system in which samples on tape loops are phase-shifted according to a set of rules, or tossing i-ching coins to randomly produce data that controlls all aspects of the composition.
In light of the history and practice of musical composition in the last century, there is really little doubt that the author of the program should be the only person to have rights to the works output by his program. He has done nothing very different than John Cage -- just substitute tossing the i-ching to generate data with using DNA information which controll the salient aspects of the composition.
The act of composition was in defining the process by which the work was created.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
Rant mode on.
That tears it! Why don't we just ammend the Constituion so that ideas and concepts are treated just like physical property. That way, the rich and the government can not only own every square inch of land that we walk on, but also our hearts and minds too. Hell, while we're at it, we might as well hold an auction on every word, thought, or idea that is currently public domain now. After all, Big Money Corporate America can surely do a better job of managing the sum of all human knowledge than us mere peasants; we should be gratefull to pay to think THEIR thoughts and use THEIR ideas. Scumbags that seriously consider this kind of shit make Star Trek's Ferrengi look like a bunch of socialists.
Rant mode off...
The one thing in common between DNA and digital music is that they are booth made to copy.
Here's a sample of my DNA, in music format:
You bastard. Remember that night? When you couldn't resist and decided you would spread your DNA all over me? Now I have a cum-stained dress. Can't you keep your DNA off of people? Now you have the nerve to put it on Slashdot. I hope you get butt raped by RMS and end up in the hospital with a torn anus.
God appears in court on Monday to sue every medical company for violating his DNA patents.
This could give the expression "playing Mozart" a new meaning... ?
If this goes through, anything which can be a sequence (tell me something which isn't (it doesnt have to be logical, just a string of values)) can be copyrighted as dna. If this happens, whats hte point in having such a thing as a copyright.
Although it may add a new way of owning games. Take the sequence from a cd, encode it as digital music, and say its yours, get the copyright, then sue game companies.
If this really happens, I'll be amazed
I can represent any digital music (or anything digital for that matter) as a number. Hell, I don't even have to convert it, as its binary representation is already a number (any string of 0's and 1's is a binary number). And since it's a number, it can't be copyrighted. Seems to have as much logic as converting DNA to music for additional patent protection. Sheesh.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
This is ridiculous. IANAL, but it seems to me that copyrighting music made from DNA sequences gives them exclusive rights to the reproduction of the music. Anyone who wanted to actually use the DNA sequence need only say "there's nothing musical about my research."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
When this thing is ready, can I get a copy of you guys? I'd like it bitrate 192, I don't like quality loss :)
I work in biotech and some of the lawyers in my company actually brought this up at a meeting a few days ago. There's an original reference in a presigious journal: Nature-Biotechnology, where, at the end of the article, the author says that this is meant to be tongue in cheek....
Isn't it ridiculous? I personally just think that people skimmed the Nature article and then came to the wrong conclusions. DNA is just data, which I can convert to any format I want. If I gzip the latest Steven King novel, I've changed its format, can I copyright that? If I change the DNA so that it's converted into a jpeg, can I copyright that?
This whole topic is so ridiculous, I don't know how to begin...
Genes which have been worked on -- where people have elucidated their function, cloned the gene, figured out what it does -- I have no problem with patents on that... but just patenting because the format is different? Ridiculous!
http://andreas.materns.com
nothing here
Would a DNA sequence encoded as music still be the same work? I'd think it would be a derivative work, contributing no additional protection for the original.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The Fazigu OpenDK DNA::MUSIC encoder has been around for a while. Since it is GPL does that make the resulting music public domain?
I'm still hopefull that this mentality is a "flash in the pan" in the global scheme of things, but sometimes I get nervous.
... these are what music came to celebrate and attempt to touch. This is Music (capital M)
...and just because most of what sells is crap, this does not mean that a label can't pick up something that rings true, something that is Music.
Don't get nervous.
And don't get all alarmist, pretending that this hurts ART, though. Yeah, it sucks that your buddies down at the Turf Club -- crappy faux artists who can't make a living in their crappy bands - turn bright green with envy as crappy faux artists go on tour and date other crappy faux artists. NONE of these pretenders make ART. And the RIAA, the Sonny Bono law, and all there kin will never kill ART.
The artistic instinct within us, it evolved over millions of years. As we rose from mostly apelike creatures with slightly larger brains into the social, communicative, deeply inquisitive things we are today, our need to express ourselves in transcendent ways arose as well. Music is perhaps most closely associated with this type of expression. Religious ceremonies, mating rituals... the things that are OUTSIDE ourselves
But music (lowercase m) now has become commoditized. It is not the Music we evolved and honed over the eons. Now it is used an opportunity for a company, with a pre-selected mass audience, to increase profit. This doesn't mean Music isn't being created SOMEWHERE. It is. It just means that what we are hearing now, on the radio, on our CDs, is not likely to be Music. We are not hearing this deeper expression of our souls.
What passes for music has become background for the commute home Using the LANGUGE of Music, it babbles away unintelligently. We sway to its rhythms, but continue to hunger for something more. "The RIAA (and its likes) have killed music." Wrong. Mass media has made "music" sound empty, derivative and hollow, but it has not - will not, in fact can not destroy real artists, it cannot kill the Music.
Independent (good) bands, unknown prodigies, people in tune with their deeper selves and the need to express something that will touch others... these people will create something beautiful, something real. It won't matter how it is packaged. A record label might pick it up, or it might not. Just because the label selects what will sell to the masses
Or maybe they won't, and the Music will sit in obscurity, waiting to be discovered someday. It still exists.
And as for the artist? Well, if we are being honest here, then for the sake of the Music itself, the true creator of Music doesn't need to be "paid" - it is the desire to make it that makes it worthwhile. The artist being paid is looking at the problem thought the lens of a businessperson. That's fine. If they want to be in business. But then we aren't REALLY whining about ARTISTS anymore but businesspeople. The artist who needs to get paid is thinking like a commodity. Hurrah if ANY artist gets paid, but ultimately it doesn't matter for the Art. Not if what they are producing is Art. If they are producing Art then the sight of the Art realized is enough.
So - yeah, the RIAA pretty much guarantees that what you'll find on a CD at Best Buy isn't MUSIC and yeah it'll hurt all our buddies in garage bands. But you know what? The ART will still thrive. You just gotta dig a little. Times have changed. But don't go getting nervous thinking that this'll kill the Art. Art will live on.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
I absolutely need to get to a genetics lab and get myself sequenced so I can copyright myself ASAP.
So if it's your DNA, what about your parents, who used their DNA to actually create your DNA?
What about a sister or brother?
What do you do in the case of identical twins, i.e. natures clone?
I'm neither lawyer nor musician. However, even if copyright was granted on DNA sequences .... biology/medicine. No more effect than using
as music, it seems to me that it would have no effect on using and publishing these same
sequences for their intended purpose
the word "CAB" in a novel violates some copyrighted song with a note sequence of "CAB"
somewhere within. It would, I suppose, prevent someone else from using these same
sequences as "music".
EXACTLY!
If the laws are stupid and open to abuse, then abuse the heck out of them until they go away.
Of course DNA is a creative work. But the author has a tendency to take things a bit personally when you step on his turf - plagues of locusts, seas of blood, 40 years wandering the dessert.
"False gods" are a particular sore spot. It also involved money and the creation of synthetic animals -- wasn't there something about cattle made of gold?
So sure, claim His work. But don't expect much sympathy when a Legion of Angelic Lawyers arrive to contest it.
</passover humor>
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
What file format would they use?
Ogg Vorbis? MP3? Wave?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Dr. Stemmer argued that it would also aid other researchers by making more DNA sequences available. With the current uncertainty about patents, some companies have refused to reveal sequences they have deciphered out of fear that they will lose the rights to them.
Feh. Let them keep their secrets. As sequencing technology improves (I work in crystallography, a related field. Sequencing is improving rapidly in both accuracy and speed.) More and more sequences will be deciphered in an academic context and released into the public domain. Public science will suffer far more from companies trying to exert some kind of intellectual property rights over this genetic information that it will from academics having to do the work of sequencing.
Secondly, the whole concept is an insult. The company that copyrights the music (or, whoever owns the copyright on the music - another poster was keen to raise this as a question) owns only the music, not the sequence the music was derived from. If I'm going to use that sequence in any kind of peer-reviewed publication, I will have to make it available to other scientists, free of charge. Now, I presumably purchased some kind of access rights to the sequence, which included (a probably unenforceable) clause not to redistribute the sequence itself; this will likely prevent me from publishing in any reputable journal. Such non-redistribution agreements are common when scientists acquire physical research tools from industry - if I purchase a plasmid (that's a tiny piece of DNA that replicates in bacteria; most antibiotic resistance in bacteria is conferred from plasmids) I have to agree not to take that plasmid, copy it myself, and sell it or give it away. I'm free to talk about the sequence of the plasmid, however. So, any scientist who purchased access to your digital music would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding the DNA the music converted into, since that DNA sequence itself is not subject to copyright. If, however, someone else (who hadn't signed such an agreement) acquired the DNA sequence, and dumped it in SwisProt, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to tell where it came from originally; unless you "watermarked" each DNA sequence you distributed with errors of some kind.
Of course, this raises fundamental questions of the validity of digital copyright law, which amounts to copyrighting integers. I can write a program (which I copyright) that converts some particular string of babble (which I also copyright) into the text of War and Peace. Do I now own the copyright to War and Peace? Obviously not! I can distribute, and charge money for "wnpcmake.exe", but I have no claims on the OUTPUT that wnpcmake.exe always produces. If wnpcmake.exe happens to produce content owned by someone else, say, "The Ground Beneath her Feet" by Salman Rushdie, then I'm in violation of Rushdie's copyright. I have no claims of my own.
The copyright is on some real world thing, not on any particular digital representation. So, Amgen might own "Human liver fatty acid binding protein cancer-prone allele in C minor," which happens to map somehow to the sequence of that allele (an allele is a particular sequence/variant of a gene); they own the right to perform that piece of music, they own the right to distribute recordings of that music (digital or otherwise) and so forth. But, they can't write some program that converts War and Peace INTO this piece of music (or vice versa) and claim that they own War and Peace. Likewise, just because a DNA sequence HAPPENS to convert to their music, under some set of rules THEY have devised, cannot reasonably be expected to grant them rights over the sequence.
Note that I am not a lawyer, and can speak only for what is logical and sensible. To the extent that law may deviate from sanity, I cannot comment. Since patenting DNA sequences flies in the face of all reason anyway, I pretty much expect to be unpleasantly surprised.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
How would this be different from taking a DNA sequence and markup, prininting it out and claming copyright as a visual work of art? or just copyrighting that same text as a novel?
I am sure laws exist to prevent that sort of idiocy, right? right?
sic transit gloria mundi
No doubt. And blood tests would be a considered a violation of the DMCA - using reverse-engineering to access a copyrighted work.
I think I'll make songs out of the various cold and flu viruses, charge a dollar royalty every time someone gets sick. I could use the extra bucks for Christmas shopping.
Can be produced my Monkeys on Typewriters, so maybe someone's DNA may prove a new Top-40's hit tune! The DNA song from the Clone Wars - "It's a catchy tune, but I've heard it before!"
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
....what happens if you play it backwards?
You can't copyright DNA sequences because there are legal requirements for a work that must be met to be afforded protection under US copyright law.
In order for a work to be copyrighted, it must have been developed independently by its author (i.e. God, or whatever) AND there must have been some creativity involved in the creation.
DUH.
...To see what horrible, disgusting freak of (nature?) is spawned by such abomibale works as "Celebrity", "I'm A Slave 4 U" or "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"?
Wouldn't it be cool if there's like one guy somewhere who's DNA rips out some funky techno beats? Probably Oakenfold or BT, if anyone. Who knows, maybe we'll get a KDNA or WDNA radio station eventually.
This is WDNA, all biotech, all the time.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
wouldn't this sart opening up huge metal faces on Mars and shit?
sic transit gloria mundi
Obviously, this is absurd. And at the same time, this ridiculous DNA-as-music scheme seems like it is workable in our current legal system. Which only means that the current system we employ to protect intellectual property of a variety of venues- music, biotech, software, movies, etc. is absurd, not just this one example.
Napster was an opening shot in a very big issue that is only beginning to grow. That is, the Internet is making intellectual property rights unmanageable. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is such a sea change our current legal framework doesn't know how to wrap itself around the issue. In a world where everything that can be digitized is essentially as free and transmuteable as water, how the heck do you establish rights and precedents and flow of profits or anything? There is no gradual change here, there is just: here's a brave new world, deal with it folks, because there's no going back.
So we have the future happening outside of anyone's control, and a legal and business system unable to know what to do with our new reality. Things will only get weirder and more contentious, as those who accept the new reality grapple with those who are still in denial. And all along no one knows anything about what to do to maintain the engines of innovation and progress that reward the best songwriters, reward the best biotech scientists, reward the best filmmakers, reward the best software writers. Their works essentially have a distribution value of zero and no one can maintain a system that ensures they get rewarded for their work.
As older, slower, bulkier distribution systems go by the wayside, the artificial resistance to free information they represented goes away. But they also represented a means of controlling that information to make sure that people responsible for the best information got rewarded. That goes away too!
What do we do? I don't know...
I for one love that I can get free music off of Kazaa, I am gleeful that software like Kazaa is essentially a Pandora's Box that can never be closed again, and that the old-school model of Music Distribution is going the way of the dinosaur in a few decades no matter how much they kick and scream. But while I sit there listening to this music, I know that I am also ripping off the artist. How does the artist get paid?
I love that we have all of these wonderful new drugs. And I love the fact that some brave pharmacists in Thailand are making their own cocktails to fight AIDS and thumbing their nose at the big Pharmaceutical companies by offering the cocktails at the tiniest fraction of previous cost. But I know these two joys are mutually exclusive, because hate the pharmaceutical companies all you want, no one can argue with the fact that as they currently exist, they are the greatest engines of drug innovation, and it is because of them we have all of these wonderful medical advances. You can't bite the hand that feeds you.
Change the legal and business system that protects their high prices and you can say goodbye to that innovation. Controlling patents on DNA is, to me, an abhorent idea. It is abhorent for religious reasons, for moral reasons. It just stinks of unnatural evil to me, meddling with nature. But it gives people and companies the incentive to do amazing things. Would I accept strong global DNA patents if I knew that it would theoretically allow companies to cure Malaria? That is one of the reasons big drug companies don't research Malaria. They know they won't make any profits. Do you have any idea how many people Malaria kills evey year?
Information wants to be free. It always has. But the difference is that the pace of communication is accelerating to such a point nowadays that it's much more rapid free dissemination is threatening the engines of innovation like it never has before. Something must give.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hmm. I'm not a lawyer, but let's look at the
. html
relevant U.S. law:
U.S. Code Section 17 Title 102(b)
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/102
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an
original work of authorship extend to any
idea, procedure, process, system, method of
operation, concept, principle, or discovery,
regardless of the form in which it is
described, explained, illustrated, or
embodied in such work
A DNA sequence is clearly a set of process
instructions for assembling proteins. I don't
think the courts will be fooled by a biotech
company trying to copyright it in musical form.
>:K
>;k
I recommend a lot of you go to your library and get a book on intellectual property law, and read it from cover to cover. God knows you (yes, you!) speculate about it enough.
Look at it this way. The DNA-encoding sequence is a method for producing music. The music, once created, is a creative work. That's like inventing a new musical instrument, and using it to play a song. Now try to claim that your patent on the instrument lasts as long as the copyright on the song. The whole scheme collapses under the tiniest bit of scrutiny.
Let's not worry too much about this one, kids. The bigger issue is that DNA can be patented at all, not the length of time some sleazeballs might want to tie up a particular sequence with stupid ideas that would have exactly zero chance of surviving in a court of law.
Whose property is one's DNA? Your DNA is half your father's and half your mother's, and in turn their DNA is half each of their parents... So isn't in a bit pretentious to copyright your DNA?
I mean what happens if some parents try to sue their child and get the copyright to their DNA?
So, if DNA sequences are going to be encoded as music files, for copyright protection, and if the RIAA is the protector of music copyrights, then doesn't this mean that we'll all have to start paying RIAA royalties if we have unprotected sex?
I'm quite sure that Mr. Disney wouldn't have felt Mickey Mouse needed additional copyright protection, because although "Steamboat Willie" and "Mickey's Christmas Carol" are "merely" copyrighted, "Mickey Mouse" (the icon) is trademarked.
Trademarks don't have expiration dates -- they are valid as long as you actively police them, which Disney (the Co.) does with a zeal that trumps the "(blank) Inside" company any day.
So, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether Disney can produce another Mickey Mouse cartoon; it only allows them to keep making money off of "Steamboat Willie" instead of releasing it to the public domain. In other words, the SBCEA's (presumably intended) effect is exactly the opposite of encouraging new creative works; instead, it encourages the milking of existing works for profit as long as possible.
sega (i think) tried to caim that the encryption key to their video games was a data song. they lost.
You only need to provide a means of proving that you were the original creator. When someone takes my DNA, and changes it to music they do not hold the copyright to it, even if the write copyright 2002 or whatever. I don't think that it would be too difficuly, given the means, to prove that the DNA was mine to begin with. The person who transformed it into 'music' could get a patent, which would be legally binding, if I couldn't prove that the patent was based on something to which I am the copyright holder.
Perhaps they can own copyright and petent for the actual song, but not my DNA. If they COULD.. it would mean that by making DNA into music, no one could reproduce the DNA as a picture or even program code. But I am not even sure if you can put a patent on a derivative work anyway. Anyone?
If my DNA sequence is identical to that of DNA encoded Backstreet Boys track, I may well expect a cease-and-decist letter from the RIAA effectively ordering me to commit suicide?
If making DNA into music can become something you can copyright, what about making DeCSS into music? It's already been done.
:-)
Wouldn't playing the DNA music be decrypting it..illegal under the DMCA?
I dunno. It's early on Sunday morning and I haven't had any coffee yet. But I'd rather listen to someone rambling DNA sequences than Shakira. Hey, maybe Snoop Doggy Dogg will bust out some hard-core "keepin' it real" inner city DNA shiznat!
So our government can see EXACTLY what kind of ill effects copyright law has on our econemny. Try and put the cure for AIDS or cancer under such a device and watch how fast the government revokes it AND makes it available for everyone else. They almost cut Cipro's exclusive patent short (or did they go through with it?) over the Anthrax problem. Judging from that initial action, The US wouldn't think twice about taking said action further against something that is critical to humanity like the cures I previously mentioned.
Before someone nit picks my response note that the entire 'cure' doesn't have to encoded in DNA but some of the critical parts that make the cure a functional whole could be.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
I wonder what my DNA sounds like?
so cortortedly that it strangles the spirit of the
law... then gangrene sets in and it's time to amputate.
Corpoarte America had better wise up.
there is only so much bullshit people will take
before you get a big backlash.
Corporations can't lose touch with their humanity
because they don't have any. they are legal constructs.
The same is not true for the people who work in
them.
So, a guy encodes his DNA as music so he can copyright it. Can he then sue his identical twin for violating his copyright?
Absolutely right! And it's even worse when it's encrypted and it's illegal to publish the encryption algorithm.
Suppose the "secret" algorithm amounts to a "one way pad" method. A one-way-pad allows one to decode any similar-length message from the encrypted data, by choosing an appropriate key. I could encode my film made at the "El Cheapo" studies in Tijuana and copyright the digital data encrypted by my secret one-way-pad, which, thanks to the DMCA, I can keep secret and send to jail anyone who claims to be able to break.
Later, in 2005, I can apply a different secret key to my encrypted data and recover a full digital version of "Titanic II - That Sinking Feeling", and claim it as my work.
A different scam, without the need for encryption: I disassemble Windows XP and copyright the resulting source code under the GPL. Yes, I know the EULA has restrictions on reverse-engineering, but how can you prove that on court?
How would this be different from taking a DNA sequence and markup, prininting it out and claming copyright as a visual work of art? or just copyrighting that same text as a novel?
There is a short story entitled "The Preserving Machine". (Can't recall who wrote it). In this story musical scores can be changed in to animals and back again... The idea is that works of art can be preserved by turning them into animals. Problem is that they don't breed true.
There is more of it to come.
Back when the Cold War ended Frances Fukiyama (?))
wrote a book called The End of History which
very foolishly assumed that our current political
economic model had triumphed and that the clash
between competing alternatives , ( and thus History) was over.
We are not the pinnacle of civilization although
we have many admirable traits. So do most of the
countries in Europe. So does Canada.
But in the USA there is a lot retarded policy.
It is the nature of power to control.
and those institutions that wield power even those only entrusted it by the people for the people will by ineviatably seek more control
--which seques into something akin to authoritarianism , ie we become the new eras version of serfs. ( it looks different everytime).
So History will continue and hopefully the fight
against this kind of evil bullshit.
everything is art. and everything is not art
just because person X doesnt think its art, or person Y thinks it IS art, doesnt make it any less art.
its up to the viewer to decide if its art to her, but in the end, its still art to someone.
the only fact is that everything is an opinion
the article
Sequencing DNA, whether of hamster or human, is a big project. Biotechnology companies spend enormous sums and tap the creativity of countless scientists to determine the exact order of DNA nucleotides in genes, in the hope that the knowledge will lead to new drugs to fight disease.
New drugs can lead, in turn, to large profits, so perhaps it is not surprising that biotechnology companies also spend enormous sums -- and tap the creativity of countless lawyers -- to figure out how to protect this knowledge. One major avenue for doing so has been through the United States Patent Office, which has issued patents on some DNA sequences (much to the dismay of many scientists and others who argue that a gene is not a widget, and that the code of life should be an open book).
But even those who welcome patents know they only go so far. For one thing, they expire in less than two decades. For another, the patent office has tightened its rules in recent years and has declared that some kinds of DNA are not patentable. What's a biotech company to do?
Take a page from Tin Pan Alley, perhaps. An executive with one Silicon Valley company is now suggesting that DNA sequences be converted to digital music, arguing that they might then be protected under copyright law. Hey, it worked for Lennon and McCartney. Why not for DNA?
"It's really sort of a very small piece of a much larger puzzle," said Willem Stemmer, vice president for research and development at Maxygen, a biotechnology company in Redwood City, Calif., who floated the idea. "Patents are important. But copyright could be equally or more important."
The technology to convert the coding of a strand of DNA -- essentially a string of letters, a different letter for each of the four nucleotides -- into music is already available. Free or inexpensive programs like Bio2Midi and ProteinMusic take such character strings and come up with musical compositions.
The result may be more Mantovani than Mozart, but that's not Dr. Stemmer's concern. The idea is that a DNA sequence, if encoded as music, might be copyrightable as a work of art. A researcher wanting to use that sequence could obtain it as a music file and decode it after purchasing a proprietary back-translation program.
Such a system would benefit the biotechnology companies, because their work would be protected -- for up to 100 years in some cases. But Dr. Stemmer argued that it would also aid other researchers by making more DNA sequences available. With the current uncertainty about patents, some companies have refused to reveal sequences they have deciphered out of fear that they will lose the rights to them.
Dr. Stemmer said that intellectual property lawyers and other genomics companies are studying various ideas for protecting ownership of DNA sequences, although a spokeswoman for Maxygen said that Dr. Stemmer's digital music proposal was intended only to stimulate discussion in the scientific community and was not part of any company strategy. Still, Dr. Stemmer noted that warfare among genomics companies could happen. "When it does break out," he said, "things will polarize very quickly."
John Dunn, who wrote the Bio2Midi program four years ago (and who has written other molecules-to-music programs available through his company, Algorithmic Arts, in Fort Worth, Tex.), said he was inspired to create this kind of software after working with DNA researchers and finding that genetic data has some qualities, like thematic variation, that are similar to music.
"Science and art are wonderful together," Mr. Dunn said, adding that he found the idea of extending copyright protection in this way unethical.
"I think it's dishonest and bad to take laws intended to let artists make a living with their art," he said, "and to subvert them to do what they might not have been able to do in a legal way."
THE idea raises some other questions as well. Dr. Stemmer has noted that Napster and other online music-sharing services showed that digital music could be subject to copyright laws. Maybe so, but only after several years of chaos, when most of America's college students, it seemed, freely downloaded every rock and roll song ever recorded without paying a cent in royalties. And the demise of Napster, after all, only gave rise to slicker, more clandestine programs that allow the downloading to continue.
Would digitized DNA music face the same problem? Would researchers be downloading and decoding popular sequences without paying for them, or trading genes like fans of the Grateful Dead trade concert recordings? Perhaps, though Dr. Stemmer said he was not worried about copyright violations by the occasional academic. It's the other large biotech companies he cares about, and it would be in their interest to play by the rules, he said. No bootleg sequences -- the genomic equivalent of "The Basement Tapes" -- for them. Just legitimate copies, obtained in a way that perhaps even adds new meaning to an old joke:
Researcher No. 1: Do you know the nucleotide sequence for the gene that encodes production of green fluorescent protein in Pacific jellyfish?
Researcher No. 2: No, but hum a few bars and I'll fake it.
Patents, copyright, monopolies, DMCA, Hollings's
latest hairbrained scheme all as cuurently
(ill) conceived will create an innovation gridlock
as all these competing interest impede each others
progress til you get zero movement= innovation gridlock.
the only movement is in the courts and by way of
natural metaphor in the bowels.
how about sequencing dna strands to hold music data. smaller storage mediums, and easier reproduction.
Don't be naive! You need 12 fingers to play a T-chord ala G-A-T-T-A-C-A.
Copyright protection on the music would not extend backwards to the thing the music was based on. Does no one bother to read the law before spewing about this stuff?
Yes, you might well have copyright to the music. (You might not; if it's purely deterministic, it's not itself a creative work, and is at most a derivative work.) However, a recording of some guy singing Shakespeare does not give you any control over the original text.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Let me tell you, it is by far his best work!
And all the record companies have to pay royalties for putting excerpts of his work in between the regular tracks of music on CDs.
But at least when I rip it to MP3, I can use a low bitrate without losing quality!
Copyright applies to a creative work. DNA sequences are discovered not created. IANAL but there is case precedent for discarding copyrights in things which weren't created.
You might be able to stop me encoding my DNA as music the same way you did, but that does not copyright the original DNA.
For the love of God.. these people need to stop coming up with lame hair-brained schemes of copy protection so that they can be the Bill Gates of the music industry. Realize this: There will never be a scheme that will be fool proof. They may last more than a day, but don't hold your breath. There are way too many people out here that know what they are doing, and too many people out there that don't.
The industry is just going to have to _ADAPT_ to the changing economy and technology. What a goddamn concept eh?
So if I get my DNA sequenced and copywritten, due to the great commonality between my DNA and the rest of humanity (over 99.99% the same), can I nail everyone else for copyright infringement? Can I get a temporary restraining order against further copyright infringment and order everyone else to be sterilized? I guess it's good for us that Hitler didn't have the DMCA in his back pocket.
Check THIS out, we're all stealing music !!!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
How about DeCSS turned into music? Also, would it be possible to coopt other people's work by converting it into music?
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Parody.
a Legion of Angelic Lawyers
If that's not an oxymoron...
In the fact that you can only patent a THING for 20 years, but you can copyright music between 95(corp) and 140(person) years.
Music is basicly a nothing, it improves society only artisicly, not with any tangiable improvement. Yet you can only patent someTHING for a fifth of a copyright.
Does anyone else see how ironic that is?
Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing...
...he's brought up a very interesting point, one that I'd like to expand upon.
:), I have already dismissed the possibility of taking a job in the US, no matter how much money I'm offered. I imagine many others have already either either taken the decision I have, or are seriously considering it.
Increasingly draconian copyright laws such as the DMCA will destroy innovation in the United States. Before the DMCA, it was possible to come up with an innovative idea without being sued for it. Now, for merely cracking a simplistic incription scheme AND for entering the US, a Russian programmer has been sent to jail. Alan Cox, who works for an American company (RedHat), lives in Wales and REFUSES to enter the United States.
How many of you think that these are not isolated incidents, but instead reflective of a growing trend among software developers? Mozilla (among other projects) has proven that you can successfully run an OpenSource project with your developers scattered all over the world, using only the internet as a means of communicating and submitting/checking out code. This means you can manage a successful OpenSource project without a single one of your developers setting foot on US soil.
What, then, is the incentive for top-notch developers to live and work in the States? ZERO! As a lesser developer
I must congratulate the RIAA and other DMCA lobbiests. They've effectively shot themselves in the foot. Because of their greed and unwillingness to share any of "their" innovations with software developers, they've guaranteed that the flow of innovation to them in their country will dry up.
This space left intentionally blank.
that just shows how horrible that copywrite protection law is...
you can now copywrite the scratches on your desk because you could run a needle across it and call it music?? Another extreme, but the same principle...
but this really seems to be a slap in the face to the music copyright holders.
When I read this article, rather than think about the actual benefits of encoding DNA into a digital music file, I thought about how silly this makes music copyrights.
Media copyrights are so insanely long, that other industries are looking for ways to milk this loophole in the system. Hopefully stories like this will make people think about what the real use for these copyrights are and lead to some real reform regarding media copyrights.
:wq
DNA sequences can be translated into musical sequences, yes... Protein Music does this, for example. But could the music be reconverted into a format so that it can be worked with as a genetic sequence? If it were in the form of a MIDI file, then it should be possible, but if someone were to download an .mp3 of genetic information, could it be used as genetic information?
Proteus' Child
Doko ni datte; hito wa, tsunagette iru.
Gakk.. Intellectual property laws are certainly getting abused - I don't think the Constitutional provisions for granting monopolies for limited periods of time to encourage the arts and sciences were ever imagined to mean "Death Plus 75 Years" or "Not until Mickey Mouse's Copyright Stops Being Valuable" or "DMCA Monopoly Protection against Screwdrivers That Can Unscrew DVD-Player Cases".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you do a google search on low cost sequencing you will find several places that will provide sequencing services. I'm not sure exactly what services they provide nor how much work is need to prep the sample or how many pairs they decode at one go.
My question is how long will it be before someone could walk into a univeristy med lab, get a sample taken, prep it, send that off to a sequencing lab and get back a CD with a sizable chunck of their DNA for under $1000?
So a bunch of scientists get a copyright on some funky-sounding music. That's still not a copyright on the DNA. Even if it was, what if two scientists encode DNA->music two different ways? The same DNA strand could have two different songs with two different copyrights.
Plus, if DNA can be copyrighted as music for 100 years, then anything from the text of a novel to the design of a combination toilet bowl scrubber/toothbrush could be copyrighted in the same fashion. Certainly there's something wrong with this.
... this is how you'd all be trading p0rn right now!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Courts have interpreted this mean that a non-trivial creative component must be part of the work; a mechanical translation of DNA to some "musical" format would therefore fail to be lawfully copyrightable.
No doubt, this idiot executive saw the DNA-to-music exhibit at the Exploratium in San Francisco...
Of course, a little legal problem like that won't stop someone from forming a business around the idea, raising funding, etc...
One possible solution would be to somehow figure out who the authority was for a particular application... Let's take, for example, the phrase "rubik's cube". A google search reveals www.rubik.com, which would therefore make the owner of www.rubik.com the patent holder for the rubik's cube.
To get the 'patent', you have to buy web space and possibly a domain name, and you have to publish a good enough description that other people want to link to it. So then, when people want to learn about a patented process, they just fire up their patent viewing application (www.google.com), and type in the item they wish to see patent information for, and bingo! there's the list.
So the patent holder for a particular process would be the site at the top of the list.
This makes your work rightfully yours, so long as everyone else agrees that you are the authority on that particular process, for as long as you care to keep people interested...
The nice thing about this system is that it's fair, equitable, rewards those people who publish their process well, rewards the first person to publish, and completely stomps all over big corporations who want to use patent law for their own nefarious purposes. In fact, it's about as democratic as you can get.
If only we were to implement such a system... *sigh*
---
[hosaka:~] ben% traceroute life.liberty.pursuit-of-happiness
long delay...
traceroute: not found: life.liberty.pursuit-of-happiness
I am artificially intelligent.
Digital transfer would be interesting though, since as I understand it, the DMCA treats the underlying data as the actual work. This just shows how the DMCA doesn't hold up to logic.
Some one out there with actual legal knowhow, check if the above scenario does actually create a legal paradox. All we need is a player that stores the "songs" as the same data that is used to create them, and we have a challenge to the hated copyright act.
If this is just a little bit hair-brained, it is because it is late.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
So now unprotected sex is considered to be circumvention of copy-control measures on copyrighted digital content? :P
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
did this dorky idea come from? Red Planet maybe? Can't remember...because the movie sucked and the idea does, too.