More on Patenting Story Ideas
To follow up on my
reply to Ivan's post about patenting story ideas, I recommend the following
article from C.E. Petit's blawg (law blog)
Scrivener's Error:
A critical failure in the Knight patent application [is that] at least from the face of the application, he has not reduced his "idea" to practice. Without a reduction to practice—whether one is dealing with a process patent or a product patent—one cannot be sure that the "idea" works... which is precisely why perpetual motion machines are not patentable subject matter.1In the footnote, he smacks Knight down even harder:
1: Yes, I've read the article that Knight published last year and laughed. It's poorly researched and poorly reasoned, not to mention completely dismissive of the stated purpose (both in the statute itself and in the legislative history) of patents, let alone the complete disjuncture from the constitutional authorization for patents. Perhaps the article is supposed to be a satirical criticism of the patent system; if so, it's a pretty abysmal one.Mr. Petit is something of an authority on IP law, having represented Harlan Ellison in a number of cases where Mr. Ellison's work was pirated and ISP services failed to live up to their responsibilities to shut down the offenders. He often comments on issues surrounding copyright infringement, such as fan-fiction, price gouging on the part of record labels, and other such topics; as such, I'd recommend that anyone who's interested in a different perspective on the copyright battles (or legal procedure in general) take a look at his other posts.
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