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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?
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....
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
The one thing in common between DNA and digital music is that they are booth made to copy.
God appears in court on Monday to sue every medical company for violating his DNA patents.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Can't use lossy compression, because your clone might end up missing parts. Of course, even recording yer DNA in raw wav format could produce digital jitter, which could enflict you clone with high anxiety. I think the best way would be to record to analog tape. But even then there could be hiss and noise, which could cause your clone to have a sibilant "S" in their speech.
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.
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
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.
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.
Check THIS out, we're all stealing music !!!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
a Legion of Angelic Lawyers
If that's not an oxymoron...
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?
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...
So now unprotected sex is considered to be circumvention of copy-control measures on copyrighted digital content? :P
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!