Short shameful compromising-my-web-geek-cred confession: part of me admires the hack of the legal system involved. Yeah, it sucks on all sorts of levels, but there's also a way in which it's pretty damn clever. (No, not that its cleverness justifies it.)

I think we've gone insane about copyright and patent in this country in general, but the idea of "patenting" genes just fucking drives me up the wall. It seems the most profound form of enclosure of the commons we've seen since they started building fences round meadows and sending shepherds to the poor factories. Evil. And this MP3 scheme is evil *and* underhanded.

LEONARD NIMOY releases a cover version of YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY!

MP3's are lossy compared to their original digital source. But they're not talking about just applying MP3 compression to a source that happens to represent DNA; they're talking about representing the DNA as music. It's incidental that they're saving the music in MP3 format.

Edited by author 05-21-2002 06:10 PM
I'm listening to vampire bat DNA as I write this. It's, uh, actually pretty good.

Even though naturally occurring genes may not be patented, there are ways around it that effectively do the same thing.

This is novel though - aren't MP3s lossy? Play back a dog and you might get something interesting. Then the benjamin worm infects your Kazaa files and the pharma researcher who thinks he's getting a dog gets benjamin's version of Lassi.

The means by which you sequence genes can be protected by patent, but the genes themselves? Please. If and when you create new genes, then we'll talk.

Edited by author 05-21-2002 12:25 PM
I'm going to encode everything I ever say as an MP3.

Could anything beneficial possibly be protected this way, inverting a crappy law to good uses?