Boy meets girl, her dad sues for patent infringement

Peter Glaskowsky, CNET News.com
13 August 2007 03:29 PM

commentary: America's love affair with patent litigation has moved to another level, with a well-known patent expert arguing movies and movie scripts should be patentable.

You're probably aware that movies, like books and music, can be protected by copyright.

Copyright protection is automatic, but narrow. The owner of the copyright has the exclusive right to copy the work and distribute the copies, to display or perform the work, and to create derivative works (like a screenplay from a novel).

A copyright, however, doesn't give the owner any rights to the basic ideas in the work. Even if you were the first person to write a story about a boy meeting a Martian princess, you couldn't use your copyright in that story to stop other people from writing their own stories using that simple plot.

However, there is a way to protect ideas under the law, according to Aharonian. First, you reduce the idea to practice: you design a system or process that embodies the idea. Then you file a patent application. If you're the first person to describe such a system or process, you get a patent.

What is it with some people? This proposal strikes me, an ordinary individual (admittedly with a particular interest in the use of copyright from a day to day perspective), as completely misunderstanding the whole point of producing a creative work.

Creative material is created because at some level it has to be made for the well-being of the individual creating it. Then it has to be shared in some way. How can one "patent" sharing? or the creative process itself?

Is it that there is such fear that 'the other' will benefit from what one creates? I have no problem with a creator being remunerated for creating. But once that creation has form and physicality then it will take on a life of its own, interacting and changing with each interaction.
A patent would probably restrict how something could be talked about or reviewed. Would a negative critique become a challenge to the patent?

This idea just confirms to me that copyright, as a concept, needs to go back to basics and evaluate exactly what it was designed to do, and just how far it has moved from that original lofty sentiment of supplying remuneration and recognition of the original creator.
Though how to wade through the layers of privilege enjoyed by those benefiting from current laws and those who aspire to that lofty state that there may be a more equitable way of dealing with things ... I feel that it lays somewhere in that psychological development layer between recognising the physicality of something (a chair) and the concept of it (all chairs).

Warning: Thinking in process!