Joyce estate sends cease-and-desist to DNA splicer

These are the days of miracle and wonder, these are the days when we live in a ridiculous science fiction world:

Last year I wrote about how Craig Venter and his colleagues had inscribed a passage from James Joyce into the genome of a synthetic microbe. The line, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” was certainly apropos, but it was also ironic, since it is now being defaced as Venter’s microbes multiply and mutate.

Turns out there’s an even weirder twist on this story. Reporting from SXSW, David Ewalt writes about a talk Venter just gave. Venter recounted how, after the news of the synthetic microbe hit, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the Joyce estate. Apparently, the estate claimed he should have asked permission before copying the language. Venter claimed fair use.

Man, do I wish this would go to court! Imagine the legal arguments. I wonder what would happen if the court found in the Joyce estate’s favor. Would Venter have to pay for every time his microbes multiplied? Millions of little acts of copyright infringement?

(via Justin Mansfield via Partijata) What I want to know is, what encoding of DNA base-pairs to letters of the alphabet did they use? DNA codes for amino acids naturally, but I don't see any obvious way to encode for the letters, spaces, and punctuation of written English.