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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."
Wrong: you already lost the right to your own genes (almost).
Check this and this; I agree it's crazy, but as always money talks - at least in the U.S, that is.
-- No sig today
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.
So no, it's not your DNA, nor is it anyone else's.
And yeah, patents are supposed to protect inventions, but then the MPAA and RIAA are supposed to entertain us, rather than intefere with the computer industry through asinine laws (while producing absolute shit in the meantime).
sic transit gloria mundi
Hmm. I'm not a lawyer, but let's look at the
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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
sega (i think) tried to caim that the encryption key to their video games was a data song. they lost.
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.
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