Interesting that this is coming up again. Over a decade ago, we designed and built a synthetic, refactored phage [1]. At the time, we (Drew Endy, Leon Chan, and I) had discussions with lawyers about copyrighting and open-sourcing it. The lawyers we spoke with (Jamie Boyle & Arti Rai amongst others) seemed to think it might be possible, but in the end we all agreed we didn't really want to be the ones that opened up that can of worms [2-3]. Later, we (George Church and I) encoded digital information in DNA, and made billions of copies of the work [4]. One of the reasons we chose George's book, is that it was clear that he owned the copyright, he cleared it with his publishers, and so we didn't have to worry about being sued by someone.
Anyways, I think the larger point is that patents can be bad, especially for synthetic biology if they cover very enabling technologies (they can be good as well in many cases). The same argument could be made for copyright - however, having both forms of IP protection would probably make things much worse. I'm still of the opinion that it's probably better leaving things be the way they are now.
[1] http://msb.embopress.org/content/1/1/2005.0018
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...
[3] http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
[4] http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf
Anyways, I think the larger point is that patents can be bad, especially for synthetic biology if they cover very enabling technologies (they can be good as well in many cases). The same argument could be made for copyright - however, having both forms of IP protection would probably make things much worse. I'm still of the opinion that it's probably better leaving things be the way they are now.
[1] http://msb.embopress.org/content/1/1/2005.0018
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...
[3] http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
[4] http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf