Patenting stories. Evil, Pure Evil!

[AdmundfortGeographer]

There is lawyer/company that is trying to patent story plots.

This is just evil... I say this advisedly. Evil.

Unless this is a prank... in that case it isn't funny.

 

[WayneLigon]

Eh, I don't see how they could possibly do that. The registrar is one of these domain-squatter services instead of under the law firm name that I would expect it would be under, so it might even be some sort of scam; there are a lot of them in the writing field.

 

[William Ronald]

Eh, I don't see how they could possibly do that. The registrar is one of these domain-squatter services instead of under the law firm name that I would expect it would be under, so it might even be some sort of scam; there are a lot of them in the writing field.

I suspect such a move would not make it in court. However, I do agree that this has all the hallmarks of a scam.

 

[Dog Moon]

Wow. Just, wow.

 

[Dirigible]

I got your "Prior Art" right here, buddy.

 

[Psionicist]

This is, in a sense, good. Programmers and software developers have been fighting againast patents like this (dumb software parents) for a while, but most non-programmers have had a hard time understanding why idea-patents are such a bad thing (mostly). Books are easier to relate to than algorithms, even if the algorithms are really freaking obvious.

Multiplication can produce powerful numbers you know. Now authors, programmers, avid book readers are against this.

Edit: Richard Stallman wrote this would happened a while ago: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html

 

[Lazybones]

This is just an application, it hasn't been approved yet. Apparently a specific patent for a literary plot was submitted by this guy (there was a more detailed discussion of this over on Slashdot earlier).

But I've seen a lot of other examples of stupid patents that were approved (e.g. http://www.eff.org/patent/index.php).

To me, patents and copyright law are part of the same big ugly monster.

The more the system moves in the face of common sense and public good, the more people will have contempt for the system, and will ignore it (save when threatened by a lawsuit).

The sad thing, is that the creation of vital ideas in the commons is what will ultimately suffer.

 

[wingsandsword]

Can you say "Prior Art"? Good, I knew you could.

Even if somehow this slips through and the patent is approved, could you imagine the unholy alliance of movie studios, book publishers, TV channels, video game companies, pretty much the entire entertainment industry uniting to take them on in court.

Yeah, it smells an awful lot like a scam, or a very bad joke. I'd imagine if this was serious we might be hearing more about it, something about all the major media outlets wanting to stir up public outrage at something that might directly compromise their entire ability to produce books/movies/TV/games.

 

[Turanil]

Literary plots all belong to a few, including : good triumphs over evil, tenacity and intelligence triumphs over adversity, etc. So, are they going to patent that? But they are stealing the plots from all the innumerable writers who have already published stuff along those lines for centuries...

This is but another scam to try to steal money from those who actually work. Myself being in the process of writing a novel, which is time consuming and arduous, I feel outraged. (By the way, the plot, unsurprisingly, is about good versus evil, although this says nothing about the story itself.) Frankly, all of this incredibly irritates me. I wish I could empty a gun in the head of these would-be thieves/parasites.

 

[Templetroll]

This is hilarious!

Recognizing that fierce competition for publication and financial reward focused on the quality of storytelling, as opposed to the quality of the underlying storyline itself, and further recognizing that even the world’s most skilled storytellers (of which he is clearly not) rarely turn a profit, his unique fictional storylines have matured into pending patent applications instead of novels or screenplays. He thus seeks reward on the true value of his innovations—the underlying storylines—instead of forced, sub-par expressions of these underlying storylines.

He realized his writing sucks so he is using his other skill to make some money off the idea for the stories he can't write! What a maroon....