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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws

At least patents expire in a reasonable(-ish) amount of time.

I also don't see how you could copyright a GMO, as at least to my non-lawyer eyes, it's not a form of expression. But I've been wrong about what lawyers will come up with, and courts will indulge, many times before. Certainly there's been enough discussion here about what they've done with terms like "speech" and "commerce"; it's as bad as the situation with terms like "racism" and "oppression" and arguably even more creative, so I don't want to push that point too hard.

I think simply embedding a copyrighted artwork in junk DNA will probably not fly in court. But if software can be copyrighted, I don't think there is a reason why GMOs -- whose design also involves some stylistic decisions -- can't be. I hope I am wrong about this, though.

The reason that patent law is widely considered more evil than copyright law in software is that avoiding copyright infringement is often a very easy task (the exception being APIs and the like). If you have a copyrighted bubblesort library, I can simply decide not to use your library and write my own implementation. By contrast, if you have patented bubblesort (depending on the sanity of the patent system in question, you might have to patent a specific instance of bubblesort which affects something specific in the real world), then every other implementation is infringing.

I also don't see how you could copyright a GMO, as at least to my non-lawyer eyes, it's not a form of expression.

First they patent the modified genome, then they patent the novel protein derived from the modified genome. That alone doubles the timespan. At least that's what I recall reading a long time ago..

Neither of which is copyrighting it. Yes, of course they can patent them. That's not at all the same thing.

Yeah, but it looks like in biotech you can get exclusivity for 2x long as for anything else.

Not that patents have any point these days - Chinese just copy everything and DGAF.

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