Comments on: Storyline Patents

By: Paula Berinstein

Paula Berinstein — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:32:56 +0000

It’ll never happen.

Paula

By: TimK

TimK — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 12:58:19 +0000

Yeah. Or else the authors would’ve told those stories anyhow and gotten sued.

-TimK

By: Harold J. Johnson

Harold J. Johnson — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 05:05:31 +0000

More than silly; this is doggone frightening as hell. Any numbers of books might never have appeared had such a law existed in years past. Examples: “Lord of the Rings” is based on a large variety of past stories; as is “Chronicles of Narnia”; as is “Harry Potter”; as is just about any mystery novel; as is just about any space-based sci-fi novel or film; as is…

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 07:29:35 +0000

True. Story and plot elements have been circulating since the Assyrians, Greek drama, aboriginal creation myths, and on and on. Italo Calvino wrote an entire book of first chapters, any one of which could have been fleshed out and made into a novel. It’s like trying to patent the pattern of roots or the exact shape of a cloud. It’s silly.

By: TimK

TimK — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 03:25:30 +0000

Yes, exactly. In software development, it’s much like this, too. But we pretty much ignore it, going into whatever creative area we need to in order to get our work done. There are certain technologies, such as MPEG4 video encoding, that are well known for their patents. Most software patents though, we blissfully ignore, knowing that either (a) we’re too small for anyone to go after or (b) we’re big enough to have a patent portfolio of our own with which to strike cross-licensing deals.

But the film and music industries’ habit of going after even individuals concerns me. Just a threat in most cases is enough to chill expression. Couple with this the fact that patents are new to us, and it’s even scarier. We understand copyrights, derivative works, fair use, and so forth. We know as a community when we’ve crossed the line and infringed, or when we should stand our ground. But patents are confusing. How do you know what a patent claims? How do you know what prior art applies?

Remember too that software development is relatively young. Stories, on the other hand, have been around for as long as there been humans to tell them. Many more stories have already been told than software that has already been created, which means a much thicker morass of prior art and much more confusion.

-TimK

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 19:51:33 +0000

I recently saw a movie called “Mysterious Skin”. One of the 2 main characters has something happen to him as a child, blocks the memory out of his consiousness, replacing it with an urban myth, in this case UFO abduction. Through flashbacks we begin to understand the “first event” along with the character who has repressed the memory. We don’t know HOW he repressed the memory, only that he did. Reading Knight’s patent I can see that the movie plot followed about 80 percent of Knight’s so-called original idea patent.

Frightening indeed, esp. when you begin to understand how so many writers and fimmakers begin the process with a single image or dream and then drewing on their skills flesh it out until it is a story. To begin to fence off creative terrain this way is really a terrible, terrible idea. I’m sure everyone of those movies Knight cites as having patentable ideas could be shown to have borrowed from earilier plots. None of those movies seemed so much original in plot as in presentation. Several where nothing more than “it’s a dream” or “I am all the characters but didn’t know it.” This is old stuff really. I suspect a truly orignal plot would be unintellible at this point in time.