If purely natural facts were considered copyrightable (! - nothing IS copyrightable unless considered so) that would mean no one were allowed to re-research nature.
Sequence a gene ? Nope, already sequenced. That's absurd. However, this intuitive logic applies to the *pure* "natural" fact *only*, that is, the, say, sequence of base pairs of a gene "as such" and "as manifested by nature itself in an organism". Anything deviating from that (pure fact) may or may not be considered copyrightable by some people because it is an *alternate* (invented) *expression/manifestation* of said fact. Some will go so far as to make copyrightable the simplistic expression of a sequence on paper, with a pencil, using characters. One may then not use that manifestation of the fact -- but still re-research the fact itself and re-manifest it for use. Some will also patent the *method* of how the fact was manifested (sequenced, ...). Nonetheless, the fact itself is re-manifestable by other means without infringing. Where it starts to get really slippery really fast is where one, say, changes a single letter in a sequence. It may be argued that that's not a naturally existing fact but an invented fact. In such cases some will argue that such facts would not exist without the invention and thus are copyrightable. It's an extremely fine line to walk. And greed, stupidity, and fear will make worse of it. Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ gpg-keyserver.de E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-med-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130925202407.gb4...@hermes.hilbert.loc
