Genetic Material as an Object of Civil Rights: Thing or Information?

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of legal regime of genetic material as a special object of civil rights combining material substance and information content. The concepts of gene (genome) proposed in the Russian legislation and legal literature are analyzed and the conclusion is made about the prospectivity of the civil law category of “genetic information”. The possibility of establishing a certain right of civil law nature on this information raises the question of the correlation between the rights to genetic material and genetic information. Traditional for civil law objects - things, which are a material carrier for intangible objects (exclusive rights, rights to the results of intellectual activity and other intangible objects) are analyzed. The peculiarities of genetic material as a thing that embodies genetic information, which becomes known only after its professional extraction, are revealed. Based on the results of the conducted research, a model of establishing legal links between existing rights to genetic material and emerging rights to genetic information has been proposed, which will make it possible to unambiguously resolve the issue of the right holder - the subject of the right to genetic information in the most diverse variants of legal relations concerning genetic material.