Intellectual Property Protection of the DNA Sequence of a Living Organism in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Other Social Challenges

Abstract

This chapter shows the problems of protecting the intellectual property of a living organism’s DNA sequence in relation to contemporary social and legal shifts. U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics Inc. have challenged U.S. and European law on what constitutes patentable subject matter. Thus, we argue that accepted patent legal protection for DNA is no longer the best option for the legal framework. In doing so, we draw three main conclusions. First, we discuss the relevance of patent legal protection under the current practice of court decisions in various countries. As a second conclusion, we show that copyright law, as an alternative approach for protecting DNA intellectual property, offers more advantages than patent law. We discuss the advantages of copyright protection in light of the application of open source, possible involvement of artificial intelligence. To do this, we analyze Ukrainian legislative proposals on artificial intelligence within the copyright framework. The third conclusion proposes leaving DNA out of intellectual property protection, which is most controversial because of the obvious harm to scientific progress in this regard.