Sarah in front of her winning photos.

Main street railroad bridge after voting

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.

I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by "picking up" and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

Quoted from: I/O Brush: The World as the Palette

After seeing Paul's photos I thought immediately of this. Now this is painting with light. Wow. You sample from the real world with the video cam built into the brush, then paint with it, like described above. But also, you can sample animated elements. You have to watch the video (linked at the bottom of that page) to really understand how amazingly fun this thing looks. You should be able to make little ones to work with tablet PCs or whatever. Wow.

Judy and jim at the albright knox