In a word, NO. MAGE is something that will be useful in microbes because you can make changes in hundreds of thousands or millions of them at once and then select out the ones you want out of the results. In addition, from what I can see, it probably would only work on prokaryotes, not on eukaryotes, and certainly not on something as complex as a silkworm. [The tipoff is the word "conjugative". Conjugation is something that microbes do to exchange genetic material but higher order organisms do not. ] And we've seen the huge problems and lack of success from attempts at getting microbes to produce spider silk protein (not to mention that none of the many attempts to find ways to mechanically spin sider silk protein have come even remotely close to success (which is why the company that had goats producing the protein in their milk went belly up (and how Randy Lewis got the goats for next to nothing.)
Bear in mind that KBLB owns rights to over 200 spider genes involved in silk processing (which has to be most of them, certainly the most important ones (if ESTs were used to find them that would pretty much insure that the most important ones were included). Note that a gene patent can cover more than one species. For something as fundamental to spiders as silk is, the genes will be "highly conserved" meaning that they will stay pretty much the same between species (as far as the most basic mechansisms spinning processes, etc; although some parts like the silk proteins may vary considerably). A good patent will be based on "consensus sequence" and thereby cover most spider species for many of the most important genes. Genes for properties which are unique to a single species will need to be for the relevant species.
Plus KBLB has a massive lead and will undoubtedly get there first and establish a dominant positition. (Think Betamax and VHS. Betamax was vastly superior but VHS got there first and won.) If you are a company researching looking for products, the last product you'll want to develop is one that will be competing with someone else who got there first. Your chances of success are a lot less and even if you do get a competitive product out, the competition will limit the profits you can make. Better to work on a product you can get an IP lock on. No other gene modification technology is within years of being able to do what zinc fingers can, so that's more years behind a competing spider silk in silkworms company would be.
At this point I think the biggest risk to KBLB is the rather unlikely possibility that for some reason not having a worm silk protein will cause the silk making mechanism to not function properly (I discussed at length before how that might be possible but also how it would be pretty unlikely given that the mechanism worked just fine when both spider and worm silk proteins were present. I also discussed that if such problems did arise, there are a number of possible ways to fix them with very good chances of success and how that could be done. (I'll go back and find it an repost it).
Bottom Line: There is no real competition for KBLB on the horizon, except possible for the very low end of the unspun spider silk protein market which wouldn't be much of a loss IMHO as the mid and high end is where most of the money would be plus the fiber is probably a lot more money than the unspun protein market.
NOTE: There are inevitably many such questions that will arise with any new technology that has a good IP lock on its field. An important principle is to never make a trading decision based on some supposed "competition" until you've checked it out, most especially not one that you find out about late in the trading day on a Friday. Unless you are familiar with the technolgy most of the seeming "threats" are something really irrelevant. There are always lots of "pseudo threats" around.
Right now the one significant remaining risk left, IMHO, is the question of whether or not KBLB will succeed in producing pure spider silk and, thanks to the zinc fingers, it's pretty small. Because it really is the only significant risk left, a PR on the production of pure spider silk would explode the SP.
To follow: explanations of why the odds of production of pure spider silk are so high.
AI
