@cathal Okay, but what if you come forward with "You ought to be able to understand, to futz, and to share as you like" -- it can be called whatever, and it doesn't need to be named as "engineering" (especially since most of what they're being prevented from doing ISN'T engineering) or anything..?
@cathal And, like, connecting the Farmers Jailbreaking Their Tractors to the You Must Buy Monsanto Every Year, there's probably space for a broad Free Software push in gardening and agriculture... (Especially if researchers can be made sympathetic, and release license the products of their research in some viral license...)
@cathal I mean, DNA does do its own replication, so probably the dynamics of where you'd need to back up Freedoms with legal claims is shifted, so it's reasonable that it wouldn't be a GPL that covers it.
And also -- have you considered going about it from the other side? Michael Pollen has a section in his Botany Of Desire (2002) where he expresses worries about copyrighted potatoes (or something like that. I know /I/ thought of Free Software when I read it. It's been a while..)
@PaladinQuinn No thanks, sorry, I was just making a Free/Libre Software joke (that I thought was a reply, even, but I guess I misclicked) and I'm not even sure how this connects.
The acceleration of memes we've noticed, from the multi-year high-intensity usage of Rickrolling, Overly Possessive Girlfriend, etc., down to the month-or-two-at-best high intensity, infrequent reaction usage after that, timeline of contemporary memes,
is at least in part us as a culture getting a healthier relationship with the hypothetical person who is the face of the meme, and doing less making-their-lives-suck invasiveness/hyperfocus.
@cwebber (My one criticism so far is that, while I get that the Vice article is the CLOSEST citation to what you're saying, EUGH it's such a bad article. Would the Verge or Techdirt articles not work as well there?)