Who wrote the book of love? Who owns the patent?

I sincerely hope this fails.

U.S. Patent Office Publishes the First Patent Application to Claim a Fictional Storyline; Inventor Asserts Provisional Rights Against Hollywood

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today from an application filed in November, 2003. Inventor Andrew Knight will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against the entertainment industry.

Falls Church, Virginia (PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history’s first “storyline patent” application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline.

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The fictitious story, which Knight dubs “The Zombie Stare,” tells of an ambitious high school senior, consumed by anticipation of college admission, who prays one night to remain unconscious until receiving his MIT admissions letter. He consciously awakes 30 years later when he finally receives the letter, lost in the mail for so many years, and discovers that, to all external observers, he has lived an apparently normal life. He desperately seeks to regain 30 years’ worth of memories lost as an unconscious philosophical zombie.

First of all, this story was written long before Knight came along: Rip Van Winkle, anyone?

The fact is, there are no original stories out there - only original treatments. Even Shakespeare lifted his plots from elsewhere; it's his facility with language and understanding of human nature that make his work so great, so unique.

Imagine if Joseph Campbell had gotten a patent on "the Hero's Journey." He would be the first person to tell you that he didn't invent this plot. He just illuminated it, pointed out how it recurs again and again and again through myth and religion down through the ages. The notion of putting a patent on something such as this is ridiculous in the extreme. This story cycle belongs to everyone, everywhere. It is part of humanity's collective unconscious, and not something that can be "owned" by any one person.

From the Knight and Associates website,

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.”

It's like a caveman trying to patent the wheel...or a carpenter trying to patent the hammer. There are so many different wheels and hammers out there that all spring from the same basic notion. So it is also with plot. There is nothing "shockingly unique" about the plots of any of these movies, most of which appeared back in the 1960's on The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits.

I hate to think of the chilling effect this would have on art and literature if one corporate entity owned the plots to these stories, and charged writers a fee to make use of them.