DNA Music: Intellectual Property and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Patent regulation provides numerous examples of how policy decisions have consequences
that run counter to what was intended. One reason that unintended consequences
ensue arises from the fact that when powerful and organised business interests
consider that a new reform inhibits their economic appropriation opportunities,
they seek to make the perceived inadequacies of the law less harmful to their
interests. They may achieve this through alternative legal means or by the adoption
of new technologies. For certain reasons, regulating DNA patenting is especially vulnerable
to unintended consequences. For businesses, one possible alternative to
patents is to encode DNA sequences as music and use copyright and trade secrecy
rather than patents. Of course, such alternative means of protection can have their
own unintended consequences. 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.

Key words: intellectual property, DNA patenting, biotechnology