History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Graham Dutfield; Uma Suthersanen
Queen Mary University of London
DNA Music: law, logic and unintended consequences
The law of unintended consequences tells us that ‘actions of people - and especially governments - always have effects that are unanticipated or “unintended”’. Intellectual property regulation provides numerous examples of how the rejection or inadequate implementation of legal reforms has consequences that run counter to what was intended. When businesses find such policymaking inhibits their economic appropriation opportunities, they either try to change the law through the selective deployment of juridical logic, or they adopt new technologies that make the perceived inadequacies of the law less harmful to their interests.
The patenting of DNA sequences is very controversial with many people claiming that the cause of biomedical progress may be better served by rolling back the advance of patent law ever deeper into molecular biology. It is not the purpose of this paper to assess the merits of all the criticisms but rather to suggest that in view of the sensitivities involved and the increasing legal uncertainties of patenting in this field, historical experience leads us to expect that businesses will seek alternative means to protect their investments in molecular biology as in other fields of science and technology.
In this article we show how one possible alternative is to encode DNA sequences as music and use copyright and trade secrecy rather than patents. One company, Maxygen, is already exploring such a possibility and we believe that other companies are likely to follow. The problem is that unlike patents, which require the owner to disclose the invention for his or her 20 year monopoly, this approach provides the monopoly protection but without the disclosure and for much longer. If we are right in predicting that if molecular biology patenting is suppressed more and more, the legal and technological measures that lock up information will become increasingly attractive to industry, then one should tread very cautiously when reforming the patent system in this field.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006