Comment by skosuri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skosuri | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that this is coming up again. Over a decade ago, we designed and built a synthetic, refactored phage [1]. At the time, we (Drew Endy, Leon Chan, and I) had discussions with lawyers about copyrighting and open-sourcing it. The lawyers we spoke with (Jamie Boyle & Arti Rai amongst others) seemed to think it might be possible, but in the end we all agreed we didn't really want to be the ones that opened up that can of worms [2-3]. Later, we (George Church and I) encoded digital information in DNA, and made billions of copies of the work [4]. One of the reasons we chose George's book, is that it was clear that he owned the copyright, he cleared it with his publishers, and so we didn't have to worry about being sued by someone.

Anyways, I think the larger point is that patents can be bad, especially for synthetic biology if they cover very enabling technologies (they can be good as well in many cases). The same argument could be made for copyright - however, having both forms of IP protection would probably make things much worse. I'm still of the opinion that it's probably better leaving things be the way they are now.

[1] http://msb.embopress.org/content/1/1/2005.0018

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...

[3] http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

[4] http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf

> I'm still of the opinion that it's probably better leaving things be the way they are now.

First off, I really appreciate your contribution to the topic!

In response though, I'm curious why you think things should be left as they are. Laws around patents and copyrights allow these sorts of things, and those laws are different or non-existent, depending on where you are in the world. It would seem to be anything but something that needs to be unchanged. While I think that status quo can help avoid further problems in many cases with law, patent and copyright reform needs to be happen and is inevitable, and this is purely a case of people working within existing laws, whether or not we agree with their course of action.

IMO & IANAL: IP of one form or another is probably necessary and beneficial for bio. If you make an invention, and it's trivially copied, then you need some protection to commercialize.

There are a few options:

1. patents -> they are expensive to get, and are medium term, but can be bad if they are trivial patents -> the biggest issue here is the non-obviousness part seems broken (as it often is in tech).

2. copyright -> easy to get, last forever , but don't cover ideas, which is very good. That said, copyrights could have much worse consequences if they are taken advantage of (b/c of ease of obtainment, and length), and of course they will.

3. MTA -> material transfer agreements probably are not viable for much longer... DNA and cells are too easy to write and edit now.

4. Secrecy -> This seems like a bad idea.

5. Something brand new -> I could think of individual policies that seem like good ideas, but I worry that I haven't thought about the ways that those policies could be captured and exploited... it seems like we are more likely to be at a better place with less risk if we can work on making the existing system better.

6. open-source and crowd-funding research

Requires a change of mind in the masses, though, to make this work for big, longterm projects ...

But I am positive, that we will see more of it, in the future ...

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