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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."
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
Don't give up on the idea completely. Maybe you can't copyright your DNA, but your finger prints aren't determined completely by DNA. If they were, identical twins would have identical finger prints. You may have to list your mother as a collaborator on the effort, but I think they qualify as a creative expression of an idea.
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