Do You Think Anyone Has Taken "Boy Meets Girl" Yet?
In the off chance that anyone has missed this, a press release on Thursday announced the publication of the first patent application on a storyline.
Yeah, you read that right -- not on a movie, or a technique, but on an actual plot. If you follow the link at the bottom of the release, you end up at plotpatents.com, a new law firm that specializes exclusively in filing patents on story ideas.
Geoff notes that this paragraph is particularly dumbfounding:
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."
Italics are from the site; the bold is mine.
As an added bonus, the guy who launched this "firm" claims to hold a Master’s Degree in Nuclear Engineering from (where else?) MIT, awarded in 2001.
...This has to be a joke, right?
1 Comments:
Someone is operating under a gross misunderstanding of patent law.
If granted, patents grant you a 20-year monopoly from the date of original filing for the commercial exploitation of a very clearly defined original idea. I'd be amazed if any of these plot-based patent applications made it through the vetting process, and even more amazed if any lawsuit involving such spurious patent claims weren't laughed out of court.
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