Music From DNA Patented

stm2 writes "Two lawyers have patented generating music from a DNA sequence. According to the patent, it covers 'music generated by decoding and transcribing genetic information within a DNA sequence into a music signal having melody and harmony.' A comment to the blog post mentions DNA-derived music being performed at a conference in 1995."

Comments

Prior Art

[Doc Ruby]

This is the kind of invention that would be worth protecting if it protected only the specific device the inventors produced to do it.

But as it happens, the patent as granted would protect them from competing with me, and anyone else whose DNA codes their bodies functionality to play a musical instrument with melody and harmony.

It's a joke, it ruins "science and the useful arts" in the name of "promoting" it, and it ruins the actual narrower right of authors/inventors to be protected for a reasonably limited time from competition stealing their investment just in time to compete with them.

But no one is talking about replacing it with something Constitutional. That would be a great invention, based on the original prior art, that should be as widely copied as possible.

Re:Uh... What?

[MightyMartian]

How would this be any different from generating music from the atomic structure of crystals, or from the x-rays being given off by a pulsar? How the fuck can you patent this? What is there to fucking patent? Christ, I wish they'd simply fine guys like this several million times their net worth or make them sign a document promising never to even go within five miles of the patent office or even think about sending in letters.

Re:Uh... What?

[Joe Tie.]

I'd say he's in the clear. The patent office, on the other hand, needs a good kick.

Re:Uh... What?

[TobyRush]

The music signal generated from the genetic data can be used in a variety of consumer and industrial products and methods. For example, novelty products such as greeting cards, genetic music CDs, and the like can incorporate a person's individual music generated from their own sample of DNA.

I wrote a program quite a while back which converted text files (say, The Gettysburg Address) into standard MIDI files, and for the result to be anything even remotely playable I needed to do quite a bit of normalization as part of the translation.

So if anyone uses this for greeting cards, it's going to be 1% DNA source material and 99% pre-conceived structure. I'm sure they'll market it as "this is the music that is coursing through your veins!" when in reality it's just a really expensive random-number generator. And I'd be very interested to see what happens if you send the same DNA sample in twice, say a few months apart, and compare the results (which should be identical, right?)...