A Plot or Storyline Patent application seeks to patent the underlying novel and nonobvious storyline of a fictional story. Such protection is to be contrasted from the copyright protection of one of millions of possible expressions of an underlying storyline. The field of possible applications is broad, and may tentatively be split into an entertainment-advertisement dichotomy. The epitome of an entertainment application is an original, thought-provoking, often shockingly unique movie plot. Several potentially patentable features may have been found in the plots of, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Being John Malkovich, Butterfly Effect, The Game, Fight Club, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to name a few. The epitome of an advertisement application is one of the many thoughtfully hilarious "Super Bowl commercials."

Quoted from: Knight and Associates - Applications

My friend Aaron dropped a link to this article about these guys, Knight & Associates, who are applying for plot patents on novel parts of plots and stories. This is insane. I mean, how can the Matrix even be argued -- when it is itself an amalgam of a dozen existing plots and the only novel thing it brought was a pause and spin camera aspect. It's nuts. Just nuts. And wrong.

"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild, said in a statement. "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."Quoted from: Boing Boing: Authors Guild sues Google over print program

Via BoingBoing comes a bunch of material about the recent class-action suit brought by the Authors Guild against Google for the Google Library project. I cannot believe how backwards some authors are, and I'd extend that criticism to artists of all types. Here's a newsflash: Nobody wants to read your book. That's why your publisher screwed you over and demands repayment for the amount of the advance your book sales didn't earm back, and that's why your books aren't available six months after they are released. I have done so many websites for photographers who complain: "Don't make the pictures big enough to see really good -- I don't want people to steal them." What? What can you do with a web-res image, even if it's 800x600 pixels? The print would look like crap, and how much are you using if somebody borrows your image for a presentation or personal project? And guess what? Making big samples available does not negate your ownership of your own work.

Avoiding the whole "should be" discussion about how fucked up copyright and intellectual property law is in the US, Google came back with a fair use claim:

Google doesn't show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.

Here’s what an in-copyright book scanned from a library looks like on Google Print: Google respects copyright. The use we make of all the books we scan through the Library Project is fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself, which allow everything from parodies to excerpts in book reviews.

Now, seriously -- what is being lost here? Even the EFF thinks Google has a good fair-use defense:

Do you know how much Amazon takes from each book sale? A huge percentage. Most of it. I was working with a photog who sells books of his work, and he said that he hated Amazon and would much rather sell through PayPal because Amazon takes such a huge commission on each sale. Amazon essentially required him to sell his books under cost (because he self-published and had no giant multinational megaconglomerate to foot the bill).

With the current state of publishing, which is a bleak wasteland of megacorporations (almost none of which are US based) and small presses who cannot secure decent distribution (because of the two giant multinational megaconglomerates who have a stranglehold on the industry -- Ingram and Navarre). Most books sell fewer than 1000 copies, and the average first novel puts an author anywhere from $4000-10,000 in debt to the publisher. (Yeah, those advances are often dependent on your book selling enough copies to make back the amount of the advance, and most books don't sell that well.) To give them credit, most publishers don't actually demand cash payment; rather, they will simply keep all of your royalties (forever) until you have made back your advance.

Of course, a first novel with no promotion doesn't sell. And this is often cited as the single biggest reason a book fails -- by the time book reviews come out in magazines, most booksellers are nearing the end of their sell-through duration. That means that as people might be reading a review of your book, the local bookstore (or bookstore chain) is likely pulling your novel off the shelves. What a vicious cycle.

Publishing has been in a majorly bad situation for about 20 years now. Nothing is really making it better. Try to buy a copy of a little-known book that came out two years ago -- it's almost impossible. Amazon has helped a lot, but at the same time it has further caused damage to the small booksellers who actually keep up with the books that are coming out and do nice things like call you by name and recommend titles you might enjoy. The last thing authors (often some of the most egotistical and self-obsessed creative types out there) need to do is follow the scent of cash to the courthouse: Google will win. They have the right to do what they are doing. You can't get upset because you didn't think of it, and just because nobody is needlessly bribing you to participate.