Looks like he’s trying to get Hollywood back into telling stories instead of having FX fests. My guess is he’s a Star Wars fan.
Someone would do this because patents are almost unbelievably broad. If I patent a mechanical process, I can sue anyone who uses that process and win even if it is being used in something I never invented or even thought to invent. If I patent an algorithm, I can sue anyone who creates a program that implements that algorithm even if I have never written a program in my life.
What’s more, I have sufficient standing to file enough nuisance lawsuits that won’t be immediately overturned to force my poorer opponents into penury and/or semi-involuntary compliance. I don’t care if I can actually win as long as I can force you to stop competing with me.
Finally, due to the above points, I can make money by engaging in cross-licensing deals with people who own other vaguely related patents so we don’t step on each others’ toes when we do business.
I have to admit, I haven’t seen the combover patent, but it sounds like a 102/103 (novelty/nonobviousness) problem, not a 101 (statutory subject matter) problem, if anything.
But, honestly, you’re either way early or a little late on this one. This guy published an article in JPTOS about this months ago. And it will be some time, if ever, before the patent is examined, let alone granted. Finally, I think that your statement that “[t]here is nothing in the recent behavior of the USPTO that suggests they would reject this patent,” is just flat out wrong. For one thing, their very recent behavior in the form of issuing examination guidelines is contrary to your statement. They also have instituted post-allowance review procedures in the business method area, specifically to reduce the number of improvidently issued cases.
ENugent: It’s entirely possible that you are right and I am wrong. However, I have so little faith in the USPTO that I do not accept their competence as a given.
A-hem!
Well, if you’re talking about competence, I’ve experienced both extremely competent and extremely incompetent patent examiners. I suspect that every patent attorney and agent has. The balance of how many fall into each category has shifted over the years.
If you really care about this issue, contact your congressman and tell him that you do not support fee diversion from the USPTO. If Congress keeps taking money out of the pockets of patent applicants to fund whatever its latest pork-barrel project is, the USPTO can’t really improve its examination practices. I have never seen an analysis of the workings of the USPTO that has not stressed that fee diversion is a significant contributor to poor quality patents. Being a patent examiner has gone from being a pretty good job to being an underpaid, overworked nightmare in recent years.
What I meant to say - before I was so rudely interrupted - was Hi! I’m actor {and playwright} William Shakespeare! You might remember me from such wacky farces resulting in marriage as A Midsummer Night’s Cream, The Taming Of The Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. And I’ll see you in court, bucko.
Thank you for telling me this. It doesn’t seem that the USPTO is open to petitioning (or else software patents would have been killed in a hellstorm of angry letters from programmers and other assorted geeks) but your plan sounds eminently workable.
I so hope this was intentional. The Bard’s Bukkake! 
Auaugghh! I swear I previewed!
You silly British authors have no power in our American courts. You’re probably a commie.
Will I be safe if I go with-
“Boy meets Girl. Boy loses Girl. Boy finds Girl two weeks later behind the sofa. Boy wonders if he’ll ever get the apartment sufficiently aired out to reclaim his cleaning deposit.”?
From the patent application:
Translation: I’m a crappy writer but I think I have a killer idea for a movie.
Amen!
Bear in mind that the USPTO is fully funded by its fees but there is little incentive for its employees to perform beyond what is required. There used to be a program called “On the Spot Awards” in which an employee’s supervisor would recommend they receive recognition for exemplary service. These awards could range from a mug to a clock radio to a shoulder bag and beyond. Another program would name Employees of the Quarter, these employees would receive a significant monetary award. Both programs were suspended about five years ago and their suspension remains in effect indefinitely. Yeah, the USPTO is allowed to retain enough money from its fees to pay its employees but that’s about it.
LOL © ® ™
ROFLMAO © ® ™
I now own the Internet.
Here’s another abuse no one stepped up to stop: extending copyright protection to characters. If you write a book featuring a character from someone else’s book, you’re likely to get sued, even if you don’t use any of the original author’s words. If that’s all right, how can anyone argue against getting similar protection for plots? Hell, at least a patent granted today will expire while some of us are still alive, unlike a copyright.
Mr2001: I agree with the thrust of your argument (I think) but I strongly disagree with the conflation of copyrights and patents it implies. Copyrights and patents are different law for a damned good reason, all spurious and braindead references to the fictitious concept known as ‘Intellectual Property’ aside. They were created by the Founding Fathers for different reasons to provide differing levels of protection to different things, and the unlawful and unjust extension of the two concepts into one overriding pseudo-moral position that the owner of a work necessarily be able to control every single expression and use of that work in every medium and every context for an indefinite period of time is utterly and essentially contrary to the vital notions of public domain, creative freedom, and intellectual honesty. The people who own large parts of our culture now would have us all believe that creation must needs occur entirely de novo, in vacuo, and free of any external inspiration whatsoever, utterly ignoring the essential facts of how the human mind, especially the creative human mind, actually works.
William Shakespeare, Walt Disney, Mark Twain, and every other creative person past, present, and future relied heavily, if not entirely, on existant works to give foundation, context, and form to their own creations. Shakespeare, one of the most gleefully plagarized authors and poets of this age, himself stole nearly entire plays directly from the works of others and passed them off, all but unmodified, as his own. One of his most famous and celebrated plays, one which the English language and culture would be infinitely poorer without, King Lear, was taken nearly in its entirety from an earlier play called King Leir. Plagarism and ‘theft’ weren’t the bane of Shakespeare’s existence, they were the foundation of it!
All artists are thieves, all authors, cannibals. To pretend otherwise is dishonest and the foundation of tragedies more profound than any dreamt of in William’s plays.
(On review, Mr2001, that had little to nothing to do with anything you said. I hope you don’t take anything I posted here as an attack.)
Indeed. While I believe it’s insane to give someone a monopoly over any part of their writings other than the actual words they wrote (such as the characters and plotlines - or while we’re at it, the moral lessons, typography, and the number of pages)… if these greedy bastards insist on trying, patent law is at least the right place to start.
In contrast, the copyright holders of Gone With The Wind claimed that The Wind Done Gone was a derivative work, even though (AFAIK) it didn’t contain any significant parts of the original writing; it only used the same characters, settings, and events. I’d rather see them patent the characters (Og forbid) than abuse copyright law in that fashion, both because patent terms are limited and because it’d be clear that they’re trying to control the ideas behind the story, not just the expression.
Only? That’s a pretty big “only”, isn’t it? Pinching someone else’s well-known characters may sell more copies of your book {and the attendant publicity from the lawsuit won’t hurt either} is lazy and dishonest, no matter how much you try to mask it as parody. Why not simply create a new character of a plantation slave in the antebellum South and write your own novel from her perspective? Because using someone else’s popular creations will hopefully sell more copies, comes the cynical reply.
One could say the same thing about “pinching” someone else’s plotlines, and one would be just as wrong. Maybe it’s lazy and dishonest, maybe not… I’m not going to argue whether it’s a recipe for good art. But it shouldn’t be illegal.
It’s perfectly legal to steal characters from another author’s books. There’s nothing in copyright law that prevents you from writing stories about a suave British secret agent or an eccentric candy factory owner. You just can’t call them James Bond and Willy Wonka.
Without this sort of protection it would be virtually impossible for authors to create extended multi-volume works. J. K. Rowling clearly has an epic story that she wants to tell involving Harry Potter, but without copyright protection for the character there would be nothing preventing other people from creating dozens of alternate versions of the Harry Potter storyline that would totally swamp Rowling’s intentions for the character: “Harry Potter’s Hawaiian Vacation”, “Harry Potter’s Battle with the Moonmen”, “Harry Potter’s Bachelor Party”.
I think it’s definitely in the public interest to give authors the opportunity to explore the characters and worlds they create over the course of multiple books or movies.
And it’s not as though this restriction places a significant bar on creative expression. There’s plenty of room for Harry Potter to exist side-by-side with other books about teenage wizards like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and Midnight for Charlie Bone. Under the current rules it requires a trivial amount of effort on an author’s part to transform a borrowed character into something fresh.
The protection for plot implied in the patent application is another beast entirely. It attempts to place a restriction on an entire category of stories. It’s equivalent to saying that no one but J.K. Rowling can write stories about teenaged wizards. If actually put into effect it would create a minefield for authors, forcing them to contort their plots to avoid accidentally infringing on thousands of different restricted storylines.