waaaaay off topic, but:
this is extremely unlikely to come off... Firstly copyright is supposedly
only applicable to work which is significantly original. But supposing they
get around that (since so many people have). There has been a precedent set
within the life sciences community that most genetic sequences aren't
patentable.
That is, those which are sequenced directly from the organism cannot be
patented. Even though several US bioscience companies are attempting to
change this, the weight of opinion is against them. Not just public opinion,
more importantly, the financial clout of Celera / Maxygen et al is
*seriously* dwarfed by Zeneca, Phizer, Sigma and the really, really big
pharma companies - none of whom want potentially lucrative gene sequences
kept out of their hands. The support of these companies for organisations
such as the Sanger center or NCBI is enough to sway legal opinion in their
favour, even in the US. Those companies who do have private sequences which
they wish to 'loan out' such as the infamous Celera, have to govern their
use through private contracts. The confusion arises since what is genuinely
patentable is original techniques and, due to a rather confused ruling made
(once again) by a rather ill-informed US court, this means the extraction
method for every different sequence can in theory be patented individually.
To analogise, this is as if people had been DJing for years but you managed
to patent mixing 'I Feel Love' into 'French Kiss' (and instantly destroyed
Derek May's mixing career). However at the moment (and for the foreseeable
future) the only truly patentable sequence is one which is entirely
artificial, and these are extremely few and far between.
-s
I think the deal here is that the copyright would be in the "sound
recording rights" not the song "publishing rights".
But it's a murky area and one thing we know is that whenever copyright
or other intellectual property rights are involved, systems designed to
protect the creator, performer and audience often end up being tilted
toward the intermediaries who add no value at all to the music, art,
photo or writing itself.
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