Last year I wrote about how Craig Venter and his colleagues had inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe. The line, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” was certainly apropos, but it was also ironic, since it is now being defaced as Venter’s microbes multiply and mutate.
Turns out there’s an even weirder twist on this story. Reporting from SXSW, David Ewalt writes about a talk Venter just gave. Venter recounted how, after the news of the synthetic microbe hit, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the Joyce estate. Apparently, the estate claimed he should have asked permission before copying the language. Venter claimed fair use.
Man, do I wish this would go to court! Imagine the legal arguments. I wonder what would happen if the court found in the Joyce estate’s favor. Would Venter have to pay for every time his microbes multiplied? Millions of little acts of copyright infringement?
[Update: Looks like it wasn't actually a cease-and-desist letter the Joyce estate sent--more an expression of disappointment. Ah, life's grand game of telephone. Joyce would have loved it. After all, he was the sort of novelist who'd write :
"What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting"]
March 15th, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Could he insert a footnote in the bug? He might consider using citations next time around,
March 15th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
“Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. “
March 15th, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Please please please let there me a retraction notice in the next edition.
March 15th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
“BE”. Let there BE. Jeez, why doesn’t your blog have the “edit-within-15-mins” function that mine does?
March 15th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first published in 1914 and 1915 (serialized). Copyright terms are ridiculously long, but max out at 95 years past the publishing date. So, the quoted phrase is not, in fact, copyrighted, but instead resides within the public domain, where anyone is free to reproduce it in any fashion.
March 15th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Copyright only lasts 70 years from the creator’s death. If Venter had waited until January 13th this year, he’d have been good.
March 15th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
No, wait! Per Wikipedia, “In some countries (for example, the United States and the United Kingdom), copyrights expire at the end of the calendar year in question.” So, not public domain until the end of 2011. I guess I learned something new today!
March 15th, 2011 at 4:02 pm
[...] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/03/15/copyright-law-meets-synthetic-life-meets-james-joy... This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged artificial intelligence, james joyce, lawsuit. Bookmark the permalink. ← Librarians Against DRM LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]
March 15th, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Joyce’s grandson Stephen Joyce is infamously protective of copyright. See D. T. Max’s profile in The New Yorker, “The Injustice Collector.”
March 15th, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Horribly, wonderfully convoluted. I love it! Could the mutations possibly produce something distinct, but just as beautiful as the original work?
March 15th, 2011 at 11:43 pm
[...] Craig Venter encoded a line from James Joyce in a bacteria’s genome. Now, he is being sued from copyright infrigement. [...]
March 16th, 2011 at 3:15 am
They should sue the DNA replication complexes for the copyright infringements… then we’ll have the first ever per-mole fine!
March 16th, 2011 at 8:42 am
The work in question, Portrait of an Artist as a Young MaN, is in the public domain in the US. All works published in the United States prior to 1923 are in the public domain here (copyright didn’t last forever back then). See http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm. The rule may be different in other countries, but any claim of infringement in the US would fail.
[CZ: So Venter couldn't bring his bacteria into Britain?]
March 16th, 2011 at 9:42 am
[...] ее последствия: [Craig] Venter recounted how, after the news of the synthetic microbe hit, he got a [...]
March 16th, 2011 at 11:11 am
Carl, I’m a US intellectual property attorney, but I don’t know an awful lot about UK copyright law. I do know that there are some important differences in the way copyrights are treated there under their concept of “fair dealing.” I think the copyright in the UK and EU will expire on 1 January 2012, at which point Venter could bring all the bacteria to the UK he pleases without fear of suit for copyright infringement.
March 16th, 2011 at 1:59 pm
[...] Zimmer over on The Loom (a Discover magazine blog) offers some additional commentary in his March 15, 2011 posting, Last year I wrote about how Craig Venter and his colleagues had inscribed a passage from James [...]
March 16th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
IANAL, but I think EU copyright law is 75 years after the author’s death.
March 16th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Term in the EU, as in the US, is life of the author plus 70 years for works for which the author retains copyright.
March 16th, 2011 at 11:10 pm
The responses of incredulity, confusion, and simple advice on copyright law must come from people who haven’t kept up with how Stephen Joyce runs the estate. The D. T. Max article mentioned above is a good one. The man is a bitter ego-maniac with a lot of lawyers.
March 17th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
What the… The quote was encoded in TAGC. Without the right decryption key it could mean anything. How can one receive a C&D for something like that? Just make up a new key and no one can prove to you that you, in fact, used that particular quote in your microbes. Silly macroscopic lifeforms. Always fighting.
March 18th, 2011 at 10:26 am
Joyce’s line has gone viral!
[CZ: Or bacterial...]
March 18th, 2011 at 12:39 pm
[...] Joyce Estate vs. Synthetic Life. [...]
March 19th, 2011 at 11:56 pm
[...] Last year, the team of noted scientist Craig Ventnor inscribed a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into the genome of a synthetic microbe. It would be a little difficult to read without an electron microscope, but that didn’t stop the Joyce estate from suing. [...]
March 21st, 2011 at 1:27 pm
[...] have commented on the legal implications of Dr. Venter’s project and the Estate, including one who imagines what would happen if this copyright infringment went to court and ruled in favor of [...]
March 22nd, 2011 at 2:08 am
[...] estate of James Joyce thought this to be a breach of copyright and sent a cease and desist letter. The Loom wonders, if it were to go to court and Venter were to lose (which it won’t, and he wouldn’t), [...]
March 22nd, 2011 at 5:40 am
@20 – The code is written in TAGC (the four nucleic acids that make up DNA), then this code is transcribed into AUCG (the complementary nucleic acids of RNA), and then each sequence of three letters is translated into an amino acid. There are 21 amino acids, each designated by a different letter. Amino acids are strung together by the ribosomes and fold up into a protein. Proteins are the functional units of the cell – motors, gates, and energy-producing equipment. This DNA–>RNA–>protein code was not arbitrarily decided by Venter. It is woven into the fabric of life. Writing in this code, the authors included instructions to decode further. So they can’t (and certainly don’t want to) pretend the bacteria says absolutely nothing or anything.
I like this article. Makes me think of the billion monkeys typing for a billion years to come up with Hamlet. Will these bacteria spin Joyce into Swift? Or maybe into an antifungal?
March 24th, 2011 at 10:59 am
This is also ironic in view of the fact that when Venter started working on the EST (expressed sequence tag) database he intended to demand copyright for the ESTs, the genes that coded them, and the proteins they produced.
March 24th, 2011 at 11:04 am
Venter holds patents on things that occur in nature i.e. specific gene sequences. Am I correct in saying that? I assume he would intend to make money out of replicating those sequences at some point. He is then threatened with a suit for copying something created by another human being from which he intends to make no money. The irony.
March 28th, 2011 at 5:53 am
[...] Estate), які заявили, що, скориставшись цитатою з Джойса, науковці порушили авторське право. Враховуючи той факт, що створена Венретом бактерія в [...]
April 2nd, 2011 at 12:50 pm
New York Law School’s legal reporting blog, LASIS, takes a look at what would happen if this case made it to the court room: http://www.lasisblog.com/2011/04/02/copyright-clash-at-the-cellular-level/
April 20th, 2011 at 5:31 am
[...] You can read two interesting articles on the subject by Carl Zimmer at The Loom here and here. (In the latter, Zimmer discusses the letter of disappointment verging on threat of copyright [...]
May 17th, 2011 at 11:00 pm
[...] #1: Craig Venter hat 2010 eine (verschlüsselte) Zeile aus James Joyce’ „A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man“ in die DNA einer künstlichen Mikrobe eingebaut und produziert durch jede Vermehrung neue Kopien dieses Textes, außerdem ergeben sich durch Mutationen Remixe. Klasse Idee – generative Algorithmen sind ja seit zwei Jahrzehnten gang&gäbe in der Computermusik, aber das mal wirklich von der Natur machen lassen hat schon was – ob da wieder literarische Qualitäten rumkommen ist fraglich, also ab mit der Idee in die Konzeptkunst-Ecke! Nun kommt’s wie’s kommen muss, Venter hat von den Rechte-Inhabern den Rüffel erhalten und soll sowas wie eine Unterlassungserklärung abgeben (wobei Joyce doch gerade allgemeinfrei wird, ach, wasweißich). Mehr dazu hier. [...]
June 16th, 2011 at 5:08 pm
[...] That may actually be the point. My 2004 article on the Bloomsday phenomenon covered the contingent nature of literary reputation. Even academic darlings like Ulysses live or die based on popular support. The June 16 celebrants are not so much interested in literary merit as in midsummer fun and a pop version of Irishness that's more urbanized than the versions presented by such icons of the Old Sod as Warwick Davis and Lucky the Lucky Charms leprechaun. (It's a special testament to Ulysses' durability that it still attracts fans despite the rotten stewardship of the Joyce estate, which throws the wet blanket of copyright on would-be adapters ranging from the singer Kate Bush to the biologist Craig Venter.) [...]