So this is how Literature dies!

[Leda EmBorr]

...with storyline patents!

This is just so rediculous... and infuriating! What the hec is wrong with people!

Article:
www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/11/emw303435.htm

This guy wants to patent his storyline and the app is getting published. And to top it off... the plot uses the term Zombie, which was coined by someone else!

As a certain someone once said--- "To a dangerous place, this line of thought will take us..."


This is the guy's website: www.plotpatents.com/

[himiko sabbrawrra]

OMG! That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. That guy isn't talented. O....


*Mutters curse words under breath*


People like that are just stupid and stuck up with infuriating ideas on a story line. I can't even begin to say what I really think about it.

[Don Solo]

Well, this is all I need to hear:

The fictitious story, which Knight dubs “The Zombie Stare,” tells of an ambitious high school senior, consumed by anticipation of college admission, who prays one night to remain unconscious until receiving his MIT admissions letter. He consciously awakes 30 years later when he finally receives the letter, lost in the mail for so many years, and discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived an apparently normal life. He desperately seeks to regain 30 years’ worth of memories lost as an unconscious philosophical zombie.

If that's his story, I don't think he needs to worry about anyone stealing it

[Cara Drume]

Oh, good grief!

That sounds an awful lot like a movie that came out several years ago...what was it called? '13 Going on 30'?

[Xana]

How silly. There are only about 10 story lines in the whole world. All the rest are just variations on eachother. There's really nothing completely original anyone can write. Fairy Tales and world mythologies have the monopoly alone on story lines.

[Don Solo]

13 going on 30... wasn't that a remake even?

[Leda EmBorr]

xana said:

How silly. There are only about 10 story lines in the whole world. All the rest are just variations on eachother. There's really nothing completely original anyone can write. Fairy Tales and world mythologies have the monopoly alone on story lines.

That's very true... hopefully someone at the patent office can figure that out!

Copyright law gives the author more control over his/her work for a longer period of time, like 100 years or something (?); whereas, a patent lasts for twenty. It would be more devastating initially; however, because it could be used as a money making avenue, as opposed to actually doing a writer any good.

[JediMistressDragon]

One shouldn't be able to patent a storyline, as something has been used somewhere in the past, startting with myths and legengs and so forth from cavepeople telling tales arund the campfire. It's only how you may do something a little bit different, like my vampire plasma machine story as a vampire story that's going to be published by Inhuman Magazine.
The world is going crZY, I swear these days.
JMD (published author)

[Ani-Chay Pinn]

They've been extending the life of copyrights and patents to unnecessary lengths in the past few decades. It's been pushed by large copyright holders, like Disney, to beyond where it protects the original author. A copyright should protect the author's livelihood. I see no compelling reason why it should protect the incomes of authors' descendants, too.

[Leda EmBorr]

Right---- or large corporations! grrrrrrr

[himiko sabbrawrra]

Well this world is ran by money and power.. it goes han in hand. You have sue- happy creatures as well. Hoping they can get something out of it. So thus with these things you have a vicious cycle that creates these new and ignorat ideals and values.

[Mon-Jas Charan]

himiko said:

Well this world is ran by money and power.. it goes han in hand. You have sue- happy creatures as well. Hoping they can get something out of it. So thus with these things you have a vicious cycle that creates these new and ignorat ideals and values.

And then there is the story of a young idealistic film maker who hated the whole Idea of corporations, struck out on his own to make movies he wanted to make. Now he is one of the largest corporations in the world. Funny how what we dislike is what we become.

[himiko sabbrawrra]

I know... No matter what you do your caught in the web.

[Leda EmBorr]

monjas said:

himiko said:

Well this world is ran by money and power.. it goes han in hand. You have sue- happy creatures as well. Hoping they can get something out of it. So thus with these things you have a vicious cycle that creates these new and ignorat ideals and values.

And then there is the story of a young idealistic film maker who hated the whole Idea of corporations, struck out on his own to make movies he wanted to make. Now he is one of the largest corporations in the world. Funny how what we dislike is what we become.

Yeah, I've often thought of that! Wonder if he thought of that when he scripted the line in RotS---

"You have allowed this dark lord to twist your mind, until now--- you have become the very thing you swore to destroy."

[JediMistressDragon]

Actually a published poet friend of mine pointed out that his storyline is not original--that washington Irving had it way before him. As another author friend of mine said, he just wants an excuse to sue, which at a writer's group meeting I was at night was said a reason you would register with the Patent bunch, as law your story, once published is copyrighted.
JMD