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Comment by Joakal | Hacker News Reader

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Joakal

That's called a copyright.

People have disputed the originality of movie ideas including Matrix [0] and Harry Potter [1].

[0] http://blogcritics.org/video/article/author-sues-matrix-writ...

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/18/entertainment/main...

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Totally not copyright. Copyright applies to software too, but patents are the one everyone cares about. The idea of patenting plots is a good one. In fact, it might even be legal _except_ that everything that can be done in a book has been done already. Software is such a young field these immodest trolls are able to exploit them.

So to clarify: Saying two different movies both of which has the "friend turns out to be bad" are copies is wrong; that's just not enough of a similarity to base a copyright case on. However, if you happen to find a way to patent it (which you probably could if there hasn't been prior art), you would be able to sue for patent infringement.

>"everything that can be done in a book has been done already"

Doubtful. But, given that if diversity in movie plots benefits mankind (!) then offering an incentive to develop a new plot could be worth it. If the plot is entirely disclosed so that it can be used for free by anyone in a few years then is this not a benefit?

But copyright is not about mere similarity: if two people reach the same plot device completely independently (or from a common source) there is no copyright infringement case. Whereas the same thing in the world of patents is a patent infringement case.

Additionally, to own copyright, you would actually have to _create_ a product/movie/etc. How any patent holder can sue without actually creating or using their own patent is beyond me.

What makes you think ownership of copyright isn't transferable?

Copyrights are indeed transferable. In fact, many of the most well-known free software projects rely on this fact (e.g., should they want to relicense, or to make it easier to defend copyright ownership in court by having a single legal entity behind it).

mluiten might be referring to the fact that copyright only applies to "original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression." (See http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html)

That is, copyrights don't cover ideas, but creative works in some fixed form (e.g., a painting or a piece of software).

I think the point mluiten is making is that you have to actually create the content (or pay someone to create it) to have copyright, whereas you don't have to implement anything to have a patent granted. Since content creation is much more expensive than content distribution, there would be no economic incentives for "copyright trolls."

Actually there are lots of copyright trolls, especially in the cases where the content is cheap to make (as in time invested) and cheap to distribute -- like news articles, music or photography.

Say you've got a popular photo, you can transfer the litigious rights of it to a copyright troll and that troll will then sue everyone using it.

Kind of like what RIAA is doing.

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