Copyright Bullying is in the DNA

Craig Venter is a bit tiresome at times, but indubitably clever. And to prove his cleverness (again) when he was creating artificial life, he thought he'd throw into the DNA a quotation or two:

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

Rather witty, no? Sadly, the humourless Joyce Estate didn't see it that way:

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

Yeah, we really need Draconian copyright laws to protect (dead) artists from this kind of evil infringement.

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Waiting for the Green Biotech Hackers

An interesting meditation on green biotech hacking, and why we're not quite there yet:

The bigger problem, though, is the turnaround time. No engineer or hacker wants to wait four weeks to see if a program works. Hit compile, wait for four weeks, no "Hello World." Start trying to debug the bug, with no debugging tools. No thanks. (I've actually had discussions with geneticists/molecular biologists who think even waiting a few days for a synthesis job isn't a big deal. But what can you say -- biology just hasn't been a hacker culture. And we are the poorer for it.)

I arrived here from the fine Open the Future blog, which had this very insightful comment in the same context:

Green biotech hacking is still in the punch-card era, and ... computer hacker culture really didn't take off until you got past punch-cards into time-sharing, where the cost in time and money was low enough that mistakes were something to learn from, not dread.

I think the latter phrase - "mistakes are something to learn from, not dread" - could well stand as an armourial motto for the entire open movement.

The Problems of a Synthetic Biology Commons

Here's a fascinating paper:

Novel artificial genetic systems with twelve bases instead of four. Bacteria that can be programmed to take photographs or form visible patterns. Cells that can count the number of times they divide. A live polio virus "created from scratch using mail-order segments of DNA and a viral genome map that is freely available on the Internet." These are some of the remarkable, and occasionally disturbing, fruits of "synthetic biology," the attempt to construct life starting at the genetic level.

All good stuff, but there's a problem that may be of interest to readers of these posts:

synthetic biology raises with remarkable clarity an issue that has seemed of only theoretical interest until now. It points out a tension between different methods of creating "openness". On the one hand, we have intellectual property law’s insistence that certain types of material remain in the public domain, outside the world of property. On the other, we have the attempt by individuals to use intellectual property rights to create a "commons," just as developers of free and open source software use the leverage of software copyrights to impose requirements of openness on future programmers, requirements greater than those attaching to a public domain work. Intellectual property policy, at least in the United States, specifies things that cannot be covered by intellectual property rights, such as abstract ideas or compilations of unoriginal facts, precisely to leave them "open" to all – the public roads of the intellect. Yet many of the techniques of open source require property rights so that future users and third parties will be bound by the terms of the license. Should we rethink the boundary lines between intellectual property and the public domain as a result?