Artificial Flowers: Plastic Nature, Synthetic Biology

This chapter explores the role that life plays in the way intellectual property law interacts with nature and how this changes with artificial or synthetic biology. The chapter shows that despite their copyright registration as sculptures, artificial flowers are not simply artistic objects. Instead, artificial flowers are hybrid objects that are artificial and at the same time extrinsically intertwined with nature. In this sense, the lineage of artificial flowers within intellectual property is closer to synthetic biology than it is to biology; to a subject matter inspired by nature but which takes up engineering standards and techniques to build nature from scratch.