{"id":4179,"date":"2013-06-13T15:15:34","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T19:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=4179"},"modified":"2013-06-13T15:45:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T19:45:22","slug":"listening-post-owning-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2013\/06\/13\/listening-post-owning-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening Post: Owning it"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Naturally-occurring<\/a>

Naturally-occurring genes are now also part of the Creative Commons. A DNA sequence at the Science Museum in London. Photo: John Goode<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved.<\/p><\/div>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But thanks to today’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling<\/a>, 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\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Genesplicer.com will never be able to repossess your chromosomes.\u00a0 And that’s something you can take to the bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As someone who has worked in the online world for a long time, I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4179"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4183,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4179\/revisions\/4183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}