Danger, Will Robinson

[rolanni]

WARNING: Deeply frightening material below. This is not a parody. This is Real Life.

Andrew Knight's patent application to claim a specific plotline (essentially the "And Then He/She/It/They Woke Up" plot) has been published.

I can't even begin to explain this one. Read it for yourself.

Y'know? Between this guy, Dr. Lessig, Google, and Amazon.com's new Pages program (where they'll sell customers specific electronic pages of books for a few cents per) and Update program (where they'll provide any customer buying a paper book with an electronic copy), writers are looking at being out of business by, oh, next Thursday.

Sheeeesssh.

Comments

[pimpcook.livejournal.com]

Wow. If that actually passes the patent office... wow.

[elbales]

Word. Who runs that place? Three stumps, a chimp, and a rock?

[elbales]

p.s. But it won't. And even if it did... MPAA would eat him alive. Nom nom.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

1. Not valid in rest of world ("business practice" patents are a particularly American perversion of the patent system).

2. Prior art: Stephen King's "The Dead Zone", to name but one. I suspect Mr King might not take kindly to being sued for patent violation by some gold digger ...

[xinef.livejournal.com]

Here is the slash dot discussion on that patent application:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/04/0239221&from=rss

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I'm about to be driven out of business by people trademarking forms of massage therapy recombined...and now this.

Just ducky. *Sigh* I hope the Movie and recording industry eat him for lunch, and his lawyer, too.

If we could only wake up from the nightmare of Dick Cheney trying to get back for his buddies all the money he lost through the asbestos wars...

[elbales]

The entire way this country deals with intellectual property is just broken. Totally broken. (No offense intended, rolanni.) I don't look forward to a future in which big conglomerates control what may be done with all the ideas. And I'm not so confident it won't come to pass.

Sad.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

I think its gone too far, and I suspect there will be a few big challenges to the Millennium Act before too long. The problem is Mickey Mouse, of course. Disney died, and to keep the copyright, they must state that Buena Vista is a viable heir.

But corporations never truly die. They should be excluded, or have a separate act pertaining to their ownership of creative properties. Not sure it will ever happen--unless someone like King gets a big name to sue this idiot for trying to copyright something that his books already have done.