zatoicchi
09.08.08, 10:21
It's a long shot, but perhaps targets of the Recording Industry Association of America's crackdown on file sharing could plead a biological influence: they learned it from bacteria and viruses.
For residents of that invisible world, free information-swapping is a way of life: it's called horizontal gene transfer. And when I talked yesterday with Eugene Koonin, a researcher who helped discover a virus that takes genes from another virus, he started out by calling the process "stealing" -- and then corrected himself.
"This is more like making a copy, and making it your own," he said. "It's more similar to pirating CDs than simply stealing.
Of course, his particular virus uses its target's genetic machinery to copy those genes, in the process making it sick -- the equivalent of copying a file with someone else's computer, and causing it to run slowly. That's not the most sympathetic image.
A Bacterial Argument Against RIAA (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/viruses-are-lik.html)
For residents of that invisible world, free information-swapping is a way of life: it's called horizontal gene transfer. And when I talked yesterday with Eugene Koonin, a researcher who helped discover a virus that takes genes from another virus, he started out by calling the process "stealing" -- and then corrected himself.
"This is more like making a copy, and making it your own," he said. "It's more similar to pirating CDs than simply stealing.
Of course, his particular virus uses its target's genetic machinery to copy those genes, in the process making it sick -- the equivalent of copying a file with someone else's computer, and causing it to run slowly. That's not the most sympathetic image.
A Bacterial Argument Against RIAA (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/viruses-are-lik.html)