Thursday, August 7, 2008

Hollywood is too engineered to be patentable

Friday's Wall Street Journal has an interesting op-ed piece by JoAnn Anderson titled "No Affairs Worth Remember: who is to blame for the death of the romantic comedy?".she argues it is a combination of the sexual revolution and fading away of class tensions). One comment in the article is worth of quoting in the national media: According to Richard Schickel, a film critic for Time.com, "movies are more structured now than they're written; movies proceed more on beats now - an action sequence, a sex sequence - what gets lost in that are people trying to exchange witty dialogue." Schickel is correct - movies are more and more engineered structures made of action components with a known useful entertainment functions. And as the Patent Office has declared in an ill-defined way, functional structures are patentable. Patents in Hollywood just helps quicken the evolution of the entertainment industry into a formally engineered products industry, the convergence of Northern and Southern California. Which is why Ex Parte Lundgren must prevail - it is more consonant with the expansion of science and engineering into the entertainment industry than the science and engineering nonsense of Bilski.

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