Do You Have Property Rights Over Your DNA?
4th November 2012
Read it, but it’s all hot air.
DNA is information, and there is no legitimate property right in information, because the essential nature of property is that it is ‘proper’, i.e. if one person has it, another is deprived of it, and that is not the case with information — never has been, never will be.
The entire function and significance of ‘property rights’ is to determine, with regard to a thing that everyone cannot have at the same time, who gets it. Information, by its very nature, is something that anyone can have without depriving someone else of it, and so falls outside of the ambit of property.
Treating information as if it were property is one of the ugliest aspects of this extremely ugly world.
November 4th, 2012 at 13:25
So, you don’t own your brain?
November 5th, 2012 at 10:24
“DNA is information” — information which my cells posess and your cells do not. Which makes my DNA my property. QED.