I Call Dibs on “The Butler Did It”

According to an press release issued last week, some guy just applied to patent his plot for a zombie story. That’s right: Andrew Knight, rocket scientist and registered patent agent, “will assert publication-based provisional patent rights against anyone whose activities may fall within the scope of his published claims, including all major motion picture manufacturers and distributors, book publishers and distributors, television studios and broadcasters, and movie theaters,” if they dare to write a zombie story like the one he came up with:

“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.”

(A “philosophical zombie” is, in fact, an amusing thought experiment that’s gained some traction in the philosophy of mind recently. Basically, it’s sort of a fleshy—though not flesh-eating—Turing machine, in that it looks human, and acts human, but doesn’t actually possess a human consciousness. Some philosophers think such a creature could exist; others think it’s the sort of thing philosophers come up with to avoid doing housework.)

Knight’s press release suggests that there might actually be a valid legal argument for patenting plotlines, which I’ll leave for people who know about such things to decide, but over at storySouth, Jason Sanford feels a chilling effect. “If the patent office allows this application, you can bet that other storylines will be protected until eventually writers may face the loss of any area of life about which they write,” says Sanford. “Since there are supposedly only seven basic story plots, the loss of even a few generalized plots would seriously hamper writers.”

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