By the Editors—: Recent Publications

Page 2 News flash: on November 3, 2005, the US Patent and Trademark Office published the firstever storyline patent application. Andrew Knight, an MIT grad and actual rocket scientist (!), wants to patent a novel titled The Zombie Stare to prevent anyone, in any storytelling medium—but especially Hollywood—from reproducing his plot. The plot? A young student waits nervously for his admissions letter from MIT. To ease his suffering he prays that he become unconscious while his much-desired letter makes its way to him—and wakes up thirty years later when the letter, lost in the post, finally arrives. He discovers that he's actively been living for those thirty years, but (bummer...) as a zombie, and remembers nothing ofhis life to that point. Only a rocket scientist could fashion such a plot, and then insist that no one steal it from him. And as for the US Patent and Trademark Office—well, these are the same folks that registered the phrase "Life Is Good"®. But anyway. When an acquaintance forwarded this announcement to me, I found myself, as I read it, misreading it; I found myselfdesperately hoping that someone would succeed in patenting the linearplot—beginning, middle, end—since I'm desperately bored bythat formula and I'd love it ifsomeone—the patent office, anyone, I don't care who but someone with real authority—forced us to find some other means ofexpression. But alas: the patent will pertain only to subject matter. And it seems that patenting itself is no easy matter. Applicant Knight bears the burden of proving that his plot possesses attributes known in the trade as "novelty" and "nonobviousness." I suppose it will be easy enough for Knight to prove that his novel is. . .novel. . .but it seems that in legalese, the "nonobviousness" requirement compels Knight to prove that the details ofhis storyline are not obviously similar to those ofanother storyline, that the differing details are not trivial in their difference. And it's this last requirement, patent lawyers say, that could trip Knight up, since minor changes in detail could make for more difference than patent courts are accustomed to dealing with. The mind reels, but it occurs to me, for instance, that I could shoot a film in which a nervous high school senior becomes, unconsciously, a prostitute forthirty years—and ifI could get Nathan Lane to play it, we'd be talking, I suspect, an entirely different film. There is some precedentforKnight's plaint, since inthe 1980sthe nonobviousness requirement was relaxed in order to accommodate minor advances in semiconductor design. Small alterations, say, to the modeling templates used to design semiconductors can evidently yield dramatic changes in, well, semi conduction. Legal scholars continue to wrestle with this relaxation: some think it encourages R&D...conduct...by promising that the minor advances will be protected; others feel that issuing patents for trivial advances works against innovation by stifling profits. To continue this fantasy-misread of my acquaintance's email: I wonder how much of this discussion might be applied to copyright. The novel as we know it rigidified as a template in the eighteenth century, and while the template itselfhas never been protected by copyright, countless variations have enjoyed that tiny ©. So if, as the survey says, consumption ofliterary novels is on the decline, might we attribute the cultural demise ofthe novel to the relatively weak nonobviousness stipulation implicit in copyright administration? Ifwe protect every minorchange in narrative (and more fiercely today thanks to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998); and ifwe guard, too, against reproductions—print or pixel or Xerox™ copies ofour work: what does this mean for novelistic innovation? Again, the mind reels, or perhaps only mine does, but to wax Utopian for a moment, knowing full well that authors, too, need to eat: instead of strengthening copyright requirements, what if we ended protection ofintellectual property altogether, returning art to a communal state in which no one owned their chunk of the Zeitgeist? Wouldn't budding novelists—or at least, those with food on the table—have that much more incentive to innovate? Wouldn't this permit the novelistic enterprise, at long last, to address its namesake—i.e., the novel...