Encoding DNA as Music for Copyrighting?

From Slashdot.com: “A Silicon Valley executive is proposing that biotech companies could improve on the U.S.’s 20-year patent protection for DNA sequences by encoding them as digital music files (Lame Free Registration required) and using copyright protection, which can last up to 100 years. Right now this is just a suggestion, and for what it’s worth, the original author of some of the DNA-to-music software thinks its a bad idea. But it’s still disturbing somehow.” Click here for the full NYTimes.com (requires free registration) article; and don’t worry, you don’t need to be a biotech/bioinformatics guru to understand the article.