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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."
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.
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....
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
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.
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
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.
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.
This same argument applies to DNA patents themselves - should it belong to the people whose DNA was used, the people who designed the PCR machines, or the mutliple alignment software, rather than the people actually performing the experiments?
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
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.
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.