Could You Patent Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Finds Girl?

from the patently-absurd dept

Two years ago, we wrote about a guy who was trying to patent a storyline. This seemed absurd. After all, written stories are covered by copyright, but story ideas shouldn't be restricted. Just the fact that there are so many different interpretations on the same basic storyline should be reason enough to explain why. In fact, we were wondering if that patent application could simply be an attempt to prove the point through the simple absurdity of the patent. However, it seems the idea of patenting storylines is getting more attention as well-known patent guy Greg Aharonian, who apparently gave a recent presentation explaining why movie scripts should be patentable, noting that it basically fits the same criteria as both software patents and business model patents. Of course, for most of us, this should simply reinforce why both software patents and business model patents don't make any sense and go against the entire purpose of the patent system. You might hope that Aharonian is also trying to prove the absurdity of the patent system with such a claim, but that may not be true either. He's the same guy who filed a lawsuit a few years ago insisting that software should only receive patent protection rather than copyright protection. As an aside, his presentation did point to a patent application I had not seen before, of someone trying to patent the process of patenting a joke in order to protect it. Talk about a joke! That one's hilarious.

Filed Under: movie scripts, patents