USPTO Issues Provisional Storyline Patent

cheesedog writes "The USPTO will issue the first storyline patent in history today, with two others following in the next few months. Right to Create points out that this was anticipated several months ago in a story by Richard Stallman published in the The Guardian, UK. With the publication of this not-yet-granted patent, its author can begin requiring licensing fees for anyone whose activities might fall within its claims, including book authors, movie studies, television studios and broadcasters, etc. The claims appear to cover the literary elements of a story involving an ambitious high school student who applies for entrance to MIT and prays to remain sleeping until the acceptance letter comes, which doesn't happen for another 30 years."

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Artificial Intelligence & Patents in a Story

[22RealMcCoy]

From the novel Autumn Rangers: http://autumnrangers.com/

The alarm interrupted the Geeks' game of Quake and brought Tucker running into the control room from his office.
"It's Ranger's signature attack," Geek1 said. "He's scrambling it, but it's him." Geek1 was what everyone called him.
"Impossible," Tucker said. "Ranger's dead."
"It's him." APRIL said. "He's alive."
In a Cold War weapons lab a mile deep in Doom Mountain, Tucker Johnson's frown was bathed in APRIL's soft blue glow. He looked at her through double-pained, bullet-proof glass. Her biosilicon computers had grown to fill four seven-foot racks, networked with billions of nano-fiberoptics she herself had designed. Somebody had just hacked into her deeper soul.
As the CEO of Silicon Virtue, Tucker presided over a team of master Geeks at the bridge and an army of slave Geeks manning cubicles on a vast floor behind them. Behind them sat the legions of patent lawyers patenting any and every aspect of APRIL that might or might not be, using the random patent-claims generator software APRIL invented to bolster patent production. Tucker would outsource their jobs to India and Asia soon enough, but they needed to get off the runway asap to close the next round of venture funding. Silicon Virtue, founded upon the APRIL (Artistic Psyche-Robotics Interface) technology invented by Ranger, was seven months old. They had to hack or reverse-engineer the source code to her deeper soul, or there'd be no IPO.
"We could Open Source APRIL and get the hacker community to reverse-engineer her." Tucker said. "Would that speed it up?"
"Definitely. We should Open Source APRIL." Geek1 said. "Such knowledge needs to be shared. She's based on natural algorithms which are discovered rather than invent--"
"But then we wouldn't own her." Tucker backtracked. "Let's try to hack her a few more months on our own--keep on patenting her--as long as the patents pass the examiners in DC, she's patentable."
"But it's not right--you can't--"
"What do you think Geek2?" Tucker asked.
"Keep APRIL closed and proprietary." Geek2 said. "Patent the hell out of her. It's our time, money, superior expertise, and--"
"But Ranger invented the basics--we'd just be fencing off his mountaintop. And plus we can't compete with a world of hackers--"
"Hackers can't compete with a world of patent lawyers," Tucker joked.
"Something this big is meant to be Open Source," Geek1 said. "Shared like the laws of physics. Ranger would've--"
"Open Source can't be trusted." Geek2 interrupted. "It won't scale for an enterprise system like APRIL--"
"We can't be trusted." Geek1 said. "APRIL's power will be immense. If we--"
"Well you two figure it out--write it up for Friday's meeting." Tucker would always say and head out to play golf.
APRIL had grown since Ranger last saw her at MIT, before his advisor Dr. Kervian "forgot" to renew Ranger's fellowship, and they reactivated him to fly the F/A-22 Raptor on its first live missions. Ranger was a Top Gun. Uncle Sam had granted him leave to pursue a Ph.D. developing the F/A-22 Raptor Radar. But once in the lab, it was hard to concentrate on Dr. Kervian's projects, as radar, retinas, physics, poetry, and AI all bled into one. It was a myth of the small mind that physics and engineering and poetry different fields, that one could truly know one without knowing them all, that one could enjoy a symphony without hearing by just counting the notes. And soon Ranger got to thinking about Beatrice's soul. Was there a chance of bringing it back?
And so he lost himself in MIT's heaven of well-funded labs, free to follow his passions in the good company of fearless grad-students, with a soldering iron in one hand and a lab book in the other, pioneering the western frontier of knowledge. But no heaven on earth lasts for more than a second, and Uncle Sam called him on home to serve. Uncle Sam invested millions into each Top Gun, and thus they were only granted leav

Security

[RAMMS EIN]

I wonder if there are any plans to incorporate the security features that OpenBSD has been introducing.