Listening Post: Owning it
Naturally-occurring genes are now also part of the Creative Commons. A DNA sequence at the Science Museum in London. Photo: John Goode, Creative Commons, some rights reserved.
As someone who has worked in the online world for a long time, I have gotten used to the notion of dealing with things that are not things, i.e, are not objects in material form. Online content is a thing only by way of analogy and imagination. As a result, much of the stuff in my life no longer has any “stuffing.”
But I am still an old-fashioned kind of boy, in that I want to know what stuff is mine, what stuff is yours, and what stuff is somebody else’s. If I buy a book, it’s mine. After I read it, I might give it to you–then it’s yours. But that is not necessarily the way it works anymore.
I buy an e-book and it’s mine, right? Wrong. It’s iBook’s, or Amazon’s. I can only buy the use of it on a machine, under terms that could cause it to be removed. I can’t pass it on to a friend, I can’t sell it at the used e-book store. Music from iTunes, same deal. Videos bought as downloads, same deal. We can subscribe to music services like Pandora, or an online version of National Geographic, but we no longer have the same use of them as if they were really ours. The real owners are somewhere out there.
It happens in the material world, too. People are owning less and less, and are buying the use of things instead. Zip cars, bike shares, furniture and appliance rental. Everything seems to cost just about the same, but at the end of the day, we can’t call it our own. We don’t own our emails or our phone calls. Everything we post online is pretty much lost to our control. Our tweets will outlast us. If someone really takes off with a clothes rental service, we might not even own the shirts on our backs.
But thanks to today’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling, there is at least one thing of mine and yours that no own else can claim as belonging to them–our genetic composition. Discovering useful properties in a naturally-occurring gene does not give the discoverer patent rights on that genetic material. So say they all. This is a huge deal for biotech companies, that had hoped to sew up exclusive rights to profitable therapies and bio-based manufacturing processes by patenting the genes involved. So, to the extent that we ever really owned our own genes, we still do. Genesplicer.com will never be able to repossess your chromosomes. And that’s something you can take to the bank.
Tags: listeningpost
I have gotten used to the notion of dealing with things that are not things, i.e, are not objects in material form. Online content is a thing only by way of analogy and imagination. As a result, much of the stuff in my life no longer has any “stuffing.” – See more at: http://blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org/allin/2013/06/13/listening-post-owning-it/#respond
Hello? It is the triumph of Communism. It is not yours; it is the state’s. Or at least in this instance, the corporate capitalists’ state.
America fought long and hard against communal ownership. And now? The commissars slid in through the back door, claiming they were “capitalists”. No difference between the old bolshevik rip-off artist and the new American billionaire. None.
I emphatically disagree with the above. While aspects of the replacement of personal ownership by use are worthy of concern, it is, at least in our society, the exact opposite of communism.
– The products, music, books, Zip cars, whatever, are privately, not communally, owned.
-They are distributed through competitive, free markets.
-Information about them flows freely, so consumers can make informed choices.
-Most important, they succeed or fail based on the choices of consumers, not an all-powerful central authority.
These are fundamental aspects of capitalism, not communism.
A huge majority of the public choosing a music delivery system may not be good, but it is not communism.
I can imagine a situation where a monopoly or oligopoly gained such complete control of the market and media that this would no longer the case, and you might have a “communistic” system in place (ironically enabled by capitalism), and certainly symptoms of it abound these days, but this is not yet the case.