Valparaiso University Law Review Volume 46 Number 1 Fall 2011 pp.1-41 Fall 2011 DNA Copyright Andrew W. Torrance Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Andrew W. Torrance, DNA Copyright, 46 Val. U. L. Rev. 1 (2011). Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol46/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Valparaiso University Law School at ValpoScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Valparaiso University Law Review by an authorized administrator of ValpoScholar. For more information, please contact a ValpoScholar staff member at [email protected]. Torrance: DNA Copyright Articles DNA COPYRIGHT Andrew W. Torrance* TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................... 2 II. EVOLVING CONCEPTS OF DNA .......................................................... 6 A. Factor ............................................................................................................ 8 B. Particle .......................................................................................................... 8 C. Molecule ........................................................................................................ 9 D. Sequence...................................................................................................... 10 E. Information ................................................................................................. 12 F. Program ...................................................................................................... 13 III. PATENT PROTECTION FOR DNA ...................................................... 14 A. Origin ......................................................................................................... 14 B. Effect ........................................................................................................... 15 C. Criticism ..................................................................................................... 17 D. Response ..................................................................................................... 18 IV. SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY .......................................................................... 22 A. Recombining ............................................................................................... 23 B. Programming .............................................................................................. 23 C. Engineering ................................................................................................ 24 V. COPYRIGHT PROTECTION FOR DNA .............................................. 26 A. History ........................................................................................................ 27 B. Requirements .............................................................................................. 28 C. Subject Matter ............................................................................................ 30 D. Software ...................................................................................................... 31 E. Functionality .............................................................................................. 34 F. Duration ..................................................................................................... 37 G. Independent Creation.................................................................................. 37 H. Fair Use ...................................................................................................... 37 I. Open Source Biology .................................................................................. 39 VI. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 40 1 Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2011 Valparaiso University Law Review, Vol. 46, No. 1 [2011], Art. 1 2 VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46 1 I. INTRODUCTION Each year since 1980, on a Friday in January, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) has hosted the MIT Mystery Hunt.2 To win this competition, a team must solve a number of challenging puzzles whose solutions reveal where on the MIT campus to find a special coin. The first team to locate the coin wins the Mystery Hunt and is awarded the privilege of designing the next Mystery Hunt. In 2005, the clues of one of the puzzles, entitled “Shotgun Wedding,” involved 11 nucleotide sequence fragments, each approximately 1,000 nucleotides in length.3 To solve this puzzle, it was necessary to understand that the fragments resulted from “shotgun sequencing,” a © 2011 Andrew W. Torrance * Andrew W. Torrance is a Professor in the School of Law, a Research Associate at the Biodiversity Institute, and a Docking Faculty Scholar at the University of Kansas. He received a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. The author would like to thank his research assistants, Dr. James McParland and Dr. Sparkle Ellison, for their invaluable assistance with research for this article. 1 The author first presented his ideas about DNA copyright in November 2008 in a speech entitled “Synthesizing Law for Synthetic Biology,” at Biolaw 2.0: Law at the Frontiers of Biology, at the University of Kansas School of Law. Subsequently, the author presented his proposals regarding DNA copyright in March 2009 in “Synthetic Biology—Law and the Next Open Source Hardware,” at the MIT Innovation Lab, MIT Sloan School of Management; in May 2009 in “Synthesizing Law for Synthetic Biology,” at the OECD Collaborative Mechanisms for Intellectual Property Management Workshop, OECD Headquarters, Paris, France; in June 2009 in “Synthesizing Law for Synthetic Biology,” at the Biotech Summer Institute at Drake University and Pioneer Hi-Bred, Des Moines, Iowa; in November 2009 in “The Legal Possibilities of Synthetic Biology,” at the MIT Innovation Lab, MIT Sloan School of Management; in September 2010 in “Open Biological Innovation—From Patents to Commons to Copyright to Open Source,” at the Berkeley Open Innovation Forum, Berkeley Law Schools, Berkeley, California; in January 2011 in “Synthetic Biology Meets the Law,” at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California; and in March 2011 in “Open Biological Innovation: From Patents to Commons to Copyright to Open Source,” at the Valparaiso University Law Review Symposium on Bioethics, Law, and Synthetic Biology, Valparaiso University School of Law, Valparaiso, Indiana. The author has previously published articles about gene patents Andrew W. Torrance, Gene Concepts, Gene Talk, and Gene Patents, 11 MINN. J.L. SCI. & TECH. 157, 157–91 (2010) [hereinafter, Torrance, Gene Concepts, Gene Talk, and Gene Patents], and Andrew W. Torrance, Patent Rights and Civil Wrongs: The ACLU Lawsuit, 8 BIO-IT WORLD 11 (2009); synthetic biology, Andrew W. Torrance, Synthesizing Law for Synthetic Biology, 11 MINN. J.L. SCI. & TECH. 157, 642–48 (2010) [hereinafter, Torrance, Synthesizing Law for Synthetic Biology]; and genomics, Andrew W. Torrance, Family Law and the Genomic Revolution, 79 U. MO. KAN. CITY L. REV. 271 (2011) that draw on some common research sources. 2 MIT Mystery Hunt, MIT.EDU, http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/index.html (last visited June 27, 2011). Thank you to James Grimmelmann for bringing this to my attention on the IPProfs listserv (October 14, 2010). 3 Jed Goldstone, Shotgun Wedding, MIT.EDU, http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/05/ setec/shotgun_wedding (last visited June 27, 2011). https://scholar.valpo.edu/vulr/vol46/iss1/1 Torrance: DNA Copyright 2011] DNA Copyright 3 method of determining the sequential nucleotides in a stretch of deoxyribonucleic acid (“DNA”). The fragments had to be aligned “contiguously,” and the ends of “contig[s]” translated into their corresponding amino acids. Done properly, this resulted in the following instruction: “SEEKGENEFRAMES.” Finally, the longest “open reading frame[ ],” when translated into its corresponding amino sequence, yielded the message “MYANSWERISSEPARATECHECKSANDTHERESTISFILLER.”4 Armed with this clue, teams could progress to the next stage in the Mystery Hunt. An intriguing feature of the Shotgun Wedding puzzle is that the DNA sequences it employed were designed by Jed Goldstone not to be precursors for the synthesis of a polypeptide that might be useful in treating disease, conferring a useful trait on a crop plant, or carrying out an industrial process. Rather, Goldstone simply used the genetic code of nucleotides adenine (“A”), guanine (“G”), thymine (“T”), and cytosine (“C”), and the amino acids (for example, methionine (“M”), tyrosine (“Y”), and alanine (“Ala”)) encoded by triplet codons of these nucleotides to create a short intelligible message. Goldstone was an author, his medium was DNA, and his products were original and expressive literary works. Although Goldstone employed A, G, T, and C as symbols to represent nucleotides, he might instead have chosen to compose his work using actual nucleotides decipherable through routine chemical sequencing techniques. Either way, the original work of authorship that Goldstone created in a tangible medium of expression using sequences of nucleotides and amino acids is eligible for copyright protection. In fact, even DNA sequences that code for functional polypeptides or RNAs may qualify for copyright protection to the extent that function does not dictate structure, and