ENTERTAINMENT ARTICLES OF MANUFACTURE USING THE IDEA OF FEMALE SPERM AS A PLOT ELEMENT

Abstract

Entertainment multimedia, including articles of manufacture, methods for entertaining, and systems for entertaining using the idea of female sperm as a plot element are described. Exemplary embodiments of the invention include television shows, movies, theatrical plays and media containing recordings of such.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

The present U.S. patent applications claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119(e) from provisional U.S. patent application Ser. No. 60/826,017, filed 18 Sep. 2006. The entire disclosure of each of these provisional patent applications is incorporated herein by reference in its entireties and for all purposes.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

A portion of the disclosure of this patent document may contain material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. The following notice shall apply to this document: Copyright 2006, Gregory Aharonian.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to the field of entertainment, and, more specifically, methods, systems and articles of manufacture that include entertainment products based on the idea of female sperm or male eggs as a plot element.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

As explained below in more detail, the phrase “female sperm” as used herein (unless otherwise specified), or “female-derived sperm”, means the type of sperm with an X chromosome created from the cells of a SRY-negative woman. In other words, the phrases “female sperm” and “female-derived sperm” as used herein refer to sperm that carry the genetic information of a woman, not a man.

An area rich with entertainment inventions is the ongoing conceptual war between science and religion, as new scientific discoveries erode at the historical, logical and biological foundations of religious beliefs. Such discoveries create social tensions that are useful in the entertainment industry when expressed as dialog and action components of entertainment products. Such entertainment products are useful as part of business methods for influencing the resolution of the social tension. Patents on such entertainment products are useful in the entertainment industry for allowing the inventor(s) of the scientific discoveries to have more control over the commercial exploitation of the entertainment applications of their discoveries.

For example, there is no basis in the biological sciences for gender discrimination, given the biologically equivalent cognitive powers of the female and male brains. Yet most religious doctrines have misogynist aspects that assign men and women different religious and societal roles based on assumed differences in cognitive abilities. Such religious/societal conditions make sex-role reversal plots a rich area for comedic forms of entertainment (e.g., movies such as Petticoat Camp (1912), Goodbye Charlie (1964), 9 to 5 (1980), and Switch (1991)). Similarly, religiously-justified racial discrimination creates conditions rich for serious drama about opposing the evils of racism (e.g., movies such as To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), Mississippi Burning (1988), Amistad (1997) and Pleasantville (1998)) or about cruelly exploiting racial differences, e.g., the 1915 movie Birth of a Nation (or pathetic exploitation, e.g., the reality television show Survivor, in its 2006 season, separated contestants by race), as opposed to science's (boring) view of skin color as an evolutionary adaptation (e.g., in northern climates, whiter skin absorbs more sunlight to make vitamin D). Such boring scientific views based on evolution, though, are less boring nowadays, in light of comedic religious opposition to evolution, otherwise known as creationism or intelligent design, opposition which itself would be very entertaining (especially in a parody) except that such nonsense is cynically exploited by unethical political leaders (who should be the target of parody). An example of (painful) comedy based on both sex role and skin color reversal is the 2004 movie White Chicks.

One such current conflict between science and religion centers on homosexuality, which science views as just a natural biological phenomena involving a minority of humans. However, many religions assert that the human-written Word of a (loving?) god is that homosexuality is a disturbed, immoral choice of “normal” humans, despite science's findings of certain genetic and developmental factors (for example, small but non-trivial differences in brain structure, and men with older brothers having an increased chance of being homosexual) that correlate with homosexual humans.

One aspect of this particular conflict between science and religion is the current controversy of extending marriage to same-sex couples. The most common objection to same-sex marriage flows from so-called “natural law”—that a god commanded mankind to “multiply” with no limits or balance (the biological definition of cancer)—for only a man and a woman to bear children together—in light of the apparent “natural” impossibility of same-sex procreation. The argument that same-sex couples cannot procreate allows opponents of same-sex marriage to distinguish judicial decisions banning racial discrimination in the legal recognition of interracial marriages (such as the famous 1967 Supreme Court decision, Lovings v. Virginia) from the legal recognition of marriage between same-sex couples. To religious opponents of same-sex marriage, there is nothing further to argue—no same-sex procreation means no same-sex marriage—“God created Adam and Eve—not Adam and Steve” and “It is honor your mother and father, not honor your parents”, the latter reflecting no knowledge of any future science of same-sex procreation. That science may say otherwise is of little interest to religious opponents and political exploiters of same-sex marriage—creating social tension useful for inventing entertainment products.

But to scientists, the problem of same-sex procreation is just that—a scientific problem to solve, another fascinating aspect of developmental biology (and for many scientists, fascinating problems are entertaining). The question is: at the cellular level, why can't same-sex procreation occur? What mechanism(s) at the genetic level (e.g., imprinting), makes, say, combining two human eggs or two human sperm, impossible; and can this mechanism be manipulated to allow same-sex procreation? Current biomedical views are that a variety of phenomena (problems with cloning, no same-sex procreation, etc.) are due in great part to imprinting, imprinting being a biological process where human genes are “marked” with methyl groups (DNA methylation) depending on if the genes are from a man or a woman—these markings affect how the genes are expressed. Indeed, in one experiment, scientists in Japan were able to combine two mouse eggs to create a viable embryo (but only by turning off imprinting, which for humans is too important to embryo/fetal development to be a viable medical choice).

Thus, the possibility of human same-sex procreation is so controversial that it can provide a basis for a variety of new entertainment products, especially movies, television shows and theater productions. For example, such products are useful in that they allow audience members to consider the biological and religious issues underlying societal sex roles and taboos against homosexuality in a variety of ways, such as through drama or comedy, rather than through very dry scientific lectures or inflammatory religious rhetoric. Traditionally, the usefulness of various entertainment forms, such as drama and comedy, have been instrumental in helping societies consider difficult moral, legal, and ethical questions, such as those posed by same-sex marriage. For example, in 2006, one cablevision dramatic series portrayed the polygamous marriage of a Mormon man and his three wives.

One approach to providing entertainment based on same-sex procreation includes female-derived female sperm, or male-derived eggs, as a plot component, that is, an object or idea used in a structured sequence of (discontinuous) actions involving actor behavior and dialog. Female sperm creates the extremely controversial possibility of a world where men are optional to the future generations of people, and renders suspect the extremely male-centric sexism of most religions. On the other hand, male eggs create the equally controversial possibility of a world where women are optional.

Novelty

Because of the historic impossibility of creating such sperm and eggs, and therefore the lack of published science to inspire entertainment creators, it is not surprising that female sperm (or a male egg) has never been used as a plot element in an entertainment product, especially products having the forms of plot structures disclosed herein.

Extremely rare are mentions of female sperm derived from a woman anywhere outside science. The Hebrews section of the New Testament portion of the Christian bible maybe alludes to such an idea. Hebrews 11:11 in many bibles reads “By faith, he [Abraham] received power to generate, even though he was past the normal age . . . . ” However, some versions of this passage read differently—“It was equally by faith that Sarah, in spite of being past the age, was made able to conceive, . . . ”, the emphasis being on Sarah's procreative abilities. Why this deliberately false translation of the word of a god? In the original Greek, Hebrews 11:11 talks of “seminal emission”, but using grammar forms indicating that the phrase refers to a woman (Sarah), i.e., Sarah is having a seminal emission. This latter translation can be justified by understanding that the author of Hebrews was borrowing from now mostly-forgotten older Greek science (advocated by Hippocrates, opposed by Aristotle) the false idea that women had sperm (mammalian eggs, and egg-sperm merging, were not discovered until the mid-1800s). The deliberate mistranslations are then due to human authors evolving the biblical text to reflect later scientific views of the non-existence of female seminal emissions.

This Biblical controversy was subject of an article in the February 1992 issue of Bible Review titled “Did Sarah have seminal emission?” by Pieter Willem Van Der Horst, which generated some Internet commentary (some of which can be located by using the query “bible review”+sarah+seminal with the Google search engine), a few of which made use of the term “female sperm”. Not surprisingly in light of the lack of any scientific basis for human female sperm, the article and commentary has not led to any entertainment use of the idea of female sperm, partly because the controversy is little known outside Biblical errancy study circles.

In 1997, scientists in Japan reported their creation of female sperm in chickens (“Differentiation of female chicken primordial germ cells into spermatozoa in male gonads”, Development, Growth and Differentiation, v39, 267-271). Their paper makde no mention of the potential use of their technique for humans, so it is not surprising that the medical news literature published little about their discovery (for one, chicken sex chromosomes are labeled W and Z, as opposed to X and Y labels for humans), and it is even less surprising that no one in the entertainment world made any plot use of the idea of female sperm, chicken or human.

In July 2006, scientists at a medical research institute in Newcastle, England, announced very limited fertilization successes with sperm derived in vitro from stem cells (In vitro-differentiated embryonic stem cells give rise to male gametes that can generate offspring mice, Developmental Cell, July 2006, 125-132). A few news accounts at the time suggested that stem cells from women could be used as well to make female sperm, though the journal article itself was silent on this possibility (a possibility that is an impossible without compensating for imprinting effects). One would obviously think that such news mentions would inspire a wealth of commentary on the implications of female sperm. The exact opposite happened, reflecting the lack of any announced viable scientific basis for sperm from the cells of a woman, and the social taboos too prevalent involving things that imply man-woman equality or female superiority (female sperm implying that men are now optional, an idea with many entertaining possibilities).

An Aug. 1, 2006, search at news.google.com (an online database of news stories from around the world), using the phrase “female sperm”, found just one reference to female-derived female sperm. This reference was a July 11 article in the Times Online (UK), titled “Creation of the test-tube father”, which reported on the Newcastle research. The fourth paragraph of the article reads: “The creation of ‘male eggs’ and ‘female sperm’, however, faces difficult technical barriers, as embryos require genetic material from both a mother and a father in order to develop normally.”, this paragraph indirectly referring to problems associated with faulty imprinting. Similarly, a Jul. 11, 2006, article from irishhealth.com titled “Women could make sperm” (www.irishhealth.com/index.html?id=9863&level=4) discusses the Newcastle work, but doesn't use the phrase “female sperm”. An Aug. 1, 2006, search of Internet blogs at blogs.google.com, using the phrase “female sperm”, found five mentions, all around the time of the announcement of the Newcastle research (e.g., www.irishhealth.com/discussion/message.html?dis=1&topic=7242”).

An Aug. 1, 2006 search at www.google.com, using the phrase “female sperm”, found about 800 Web pages mentioning the phrase “female sperm”. Only a few dealt with female-derived female sperm. Two Web pages were in response to the Times Online article about the Newcastle research (“Female Sperm”, http://hthse.com/wordpress/2006/07/17/female-sperm; and “Women are capable of producing female sperm”, www.eurogamer.net/forum_thread_posts.php?thread_id=59557&forum_id=1), a low number of Web pages given the radicalness of female-derived female sperm and the uninhibited comments of Web users on every bizarre issue. A few pages dealt with medieval arguments over ancient Greek beliefs that females produce sperm (“Giles of Rome”, plato.Stanford.edu/entries/giles). A few other Web pages dealt with the above-mentioned Biblical controversy involving Sarah. A similar Aug. 1, 2006 Google search using the phrase “female spermatogenesis” returned only 11 Web pages, most variants of the two words separated by punctuation (“ . . . female, spermatogenesis in . . . ”) and therefore not connected in terms of being a standalone phrase.

Indeed, one year prior to the 2006 announcement of the Newcastle (UK) research, in June 2005, another group of UK researchers at Sheffield University announced that sperm and egg cells could be created from stem cells. They did not actually produce full sperm or egg cells, but rather disclosed possibilities. Once again, the possibilities focused mostly on male needs. For example, in an article in the 20 Jun. 2005 Guardian by James Meikle, “Sperm and eggs could be created from stem cells, says new study” (www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1510299,00.html), there appears a paragraph: “Gay couples could have children genetically related to both. Single men could even produce a child using their own sperm and an engineered egg, opening the way to a new form of cloning. Women's fertility would no longer need to be curtailed at the menopause.” The implication of the last quoted sentence is that women could regenerate their eggs, with the reporter obviously not mentioning the more provocative implication of producing “female sperm” despite the mention of “male eggs”.

Related to the phrase “female sperm” is the very infrequently used phrase “woman sperm”. A Google search for “woman sperm” did not return many hits, the majority of which were writings where “woman” and “sperm” appeared next to each other in a sentence, but separated by punctuation such as a comma. A few pages referring to the Newcastle research made use of the phrase “woman sperm”.

An Aug. 1, 2006 search at Findarticles.com, an online database to 10,000,000 magazine, newspaper and journal articles from the last twenty years (1984 to 2006), using the phrase “female sperm” as the search query, found just 37 references out of the 10,000,000 articles. Subtracting out duplicate references and references where “female” and “sperm” appeared in different sentences (“ . . . the female. Sperm is . . . ”), left 30 references. Of these, six made use of the phrase “female sperm whale”. The other 24 references, used “female sperm” in two contexts—that of sorting man-derived sperm with an Y chromosome from man-derived sperm with an X chromosome; and that of the biology of male-derived sperm with an X chromosome. These 24 references are listed in FIG. 1. Thus, out of these 10 million articles, not one mentions the idea of female sperm derived from a woman.

An Aug. 1, 2006 of the database Dissertations Abstracts of university MS and PhD theses, for these phrases, found similar different uses of these phrases as opposed to the uses of these phrases as disclosed herein. A search of two lesbian-related abstracts databases, GenderWatch and GLBT Life, found no such mentions of female sperm from a woman.

One of the few law review articles on the legal aspects of lesbian procreation by Kyle Velte, “Egging on Lesbian Maternity: the Legal Implications of Tri-Gametic In Vitro Fertilization”, Am. U.J. Gender Soc. Policy & Law, 1998/1999, p. 431, in footnote 11 mentions the idea of using sperm casings (sperm with the man's DNA removed) to carry a woman's DNA, one way to make a female-DNA-derived sperm. Interestingly, the article does not use the phrase “female sperm”, and there have been few, if any, further mentions of sperm casings in the literature because of the impossibility of using sperm casings to achieve procreation (the transplanted female DNA is incorrectly imprinted—for the same reason, you can't have egg casings for men).

A Jul. 17, 2006 search of Google for any Web pages with the phrase “Honor Your Mother and Mother” (which logically follows as a socio-religious policy from the possibility of female sperm), out of billions of Web pages, only found two such pages which used the phrase, but completely differently from the use herein. One Web page used the phrase “honor your mother and mother-in-law” in the context of buying flowers for weddings, while the other page used the phase “honor your mother and Mother Earth” to encourage people to plant trees. Such a phrase creates much social tension to be a useful plot element, because of the implication that the original religious phrase was written from the point of an erroneous understanding of reproductive biology.

Non-Obviousness

Not only is there an absence of female sperm as a plot element in the no-limits-to-ideas worlds of science fiction and fantasy, but also there is no published motivation to so use female sperm as a plot element.

Such motivation is missing in the wealth of literature of lesbian fantasy stories, lesbians who presumably would be most motivated to have such fantasies of female sperm (especially in an era of the fight for legalizing same sex marriage). For example, some stories make use of certain strap-on artificial human penises that have the ability to squirt a liquid at an appropriate moment, presumably, to simulate ejaculation (Google search using “ejaculating dildo”). You would think that at least one pair of lesbians in a loving relationship, using such a device for entertainment, would have thought “If only the fake sperm was real and from our cells”, and created entertainment about a world where female sperm from women exists.

Or you would think that a strong advocate for lesbians would write something similar. For example, in the 1985 book Lesbian Origins by Susan Cavin, she writes on page 39:

“We . . . hold that individual men are the historical creators, heirs and profiteering instruments of applied male supremacist systems. Men are both the chicken and sperm of patriarchy.”

This is an entertaining bit of sarcasm using the joke of “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”, but since men do not have eggs, she uses “sperm”. Yet from her attitude, she could have consistently added the following sarcasm—“Too bad women don't have their own sperm.” Such sarcasm (or hopeful thinking) would also have been appropriate in the 1973 movie Wicker Man (remade in 2006 as the movie Run A Mile), about an island where women seduce and control men for procreation, and then plot to kill most of the men after the women get the mens' sperm. Similarly, singers such as Madonna, with their sophomoric attempts in their songs and videos to show that women have “balls”, didn't take this idea to its conclusion—a ballsy woman completely equal to a man could make her own sperm. Without any science to shape their thoughts, it was not obvious to such writers and filmmakers to consider the possibilities of female sperm, e.g., the use of female sperm as a plot element.

More recently there is the non-fiction book written by Molly Miller titled Lesbian Sperm Tales (Author House, Bloomington, Ind., spring 2006), which would seem to be a most obvious book in which to speculate about sperm derived from the cells of a woman. Instead, Lesbian Sperm Tales is about the experiences of lesbians making babies with sperm obtained from sperm banks—no mention of female sperm, despite the simplicity and relevance of doing so, for example, by also including in the book the sentence “If only we could withdraw female sperm from these sperm banks.” An Aug. 1, 2006, Google search of the Internet for the phrase “lesbian sperm” returned references mostly about sperm banks and sperm donors using sperm from men, with one or two references to the Newcastle research. Another such book, titled Buying Dad: One Woman's Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor, by Harlyn Aizley (Alyson Books, Los Angeles, Calif., 2003), recounts one lesbian's couple to have a children using sperm from a man. Parts of the book discuss their hunt through sperm banks for sperm from the “ideal” man. Similarly, in another book, Are Men Necessary, by New York Times columnist Maureen Down (Berkeley Books, New York, N.Y., 2005), quotes one doctor (page 144) as saying “What I think'll happen within my lifetime is that some lesbian couples will have children, and they will both be parents, an egg from one and a fertilized egg from the other will produce a perfectly normal girl. You could have a new species of human reproduced without men at all.” Again, both books have no mention of female sperm, i.e., neither fantasizing if one of the lesbians could have sperm of her own to be combined with an egg of the other lesbian, despite such books being the most likely context in which to do so.

Indeed, sperm from men is rarely a plot element (that is, outside of the world of adult sexual movies, and ignoring bad sperm jokes made in too many movies geared towards young men, such as the 2003 movie American Pie). To date, there have been only a handful of serious movies using sperm from men as a plot element. Such movies include: Aristocrats (2005), Semen, una historia de amor (2005), Succubus (2004), Donor (2002), Shooting Blanks (2001), Made in America (1993), Frozen Assets (1992), and Spermula (1976), or a movie that includes a sperm joke or two (e.g., the 1988 movie Moon Over Parador). The 1983 Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life is noted for one song, Every Sperm is Sacred. Other movies used metaphoric objects to represent sperm from men, for example, the somewhat sperm-shaped worms in the 1977 movie Eraserhead.

A comedic play performed in San Francisco in 2005 and 2006, Sperm WARFARE, is about a husband and wife arguing in a sperm clinic as the husband tries to produce a sperm sample. At one point, the dialog mentions the Old Testament story of Sarah being fertile after menopause—with the scriptwriter apparently being unaware of the New Testament suggestion that Sarah had sperm—which could have been the basis for some sarcastic jokes made by the wife about her husband's inability to produce a sperm sample. For example, one such line of dialog NOT used in the play could have been the wife saying—“Who needs you?—Like Sarah—I will make my own sperm.” Without any science to shape their thoughts, it was not obvious to such entertainers to consider the possibilities of sperm from women.

In 2005, Tom Dougherty Associates publishers released a science fiction/mystery 533-page paperback book titled “The Athena Factor” by W. Michael Gear. The plot novelty is that cells of movie stars are stolen and cloned, with the resulting embryo clones sold to women fans of the stars—“Have a Julia Roberts baby of your own!!” Much of the book's plot elements and structures is found in the prior art of mystery writing—Hollywood politics, bodyguards, love interests, embittered workers, betrayals, lawyers, etc. FIG. 2 lists excerpts from the book that are specific to this plot novelty of illegally cloning stars, and interestingly make up in total only a few pages of text out of the 533 pages of the book. The drama in this book would have been greater if the author had made use of a sperm from women—“Have a baby with Julia Roberts by buying her sperm.” Yet despite being aware of much of the science of that goes into making sperm, but not the science of sperm from women, it was not obvious to the author to make use of female sperm as a plot element.

This lack of imagination with regards to the fantasy of having female sperm is in contrast to other impossible (or at least unreported) medical phenomena used as a plot element in a television show or movie. For example, the 1978 movie Rabbit Test had the male character (played by comedian Billy Christal) getting pregnant and having a baby girl. The movie did not explain how the man got pregnant, which was addressed in the 1994 movie Junior, in which actor Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant when an embryo (his sperm, a female colleague's egg) is implanted in his abdominal cavity (which some scientists speculate could be possible). In another example, the television show, Grey's Anatomy (2005 season), had a plot element where a man was discovered to have an ovary in his bladder—a male ovary in a sense—the result of DNA from an extra embryo that fused in the womb. In many of these cases, it is a man's sexuality that is the obvious plot element to invent with, reflecting the effects of general social misogyny on a particular industry (there are more movies with men dressing/acting as women as a plot element, e.g., the 1959 movie Some Like it Hot, the 1990 movie Nuns on the Run, the 2004 movie White Chicks, then women dressing/acting as men, e.g., the 1983 movie Yentl).

And even when a strange new scientific idea is published, it may take many years for someone to invent a use for the scientific idea as a plot element. For example, a 1988 Nature paper by physicist Jack Hills described how black holes could slingshot a star, which science fiction writer Paul McAuley used five years later in his 1993 book Eternal Light, where a star was slingshot at the Earth by an alien race. In other cases, the science fiction is many years ahead of the science. In 1955, writer Philip Dick wrote the story Autofac, in which micro-machines, smaller than ants, construct duplicates of themselves, decades before nanotechnologists in the 1990s started doing research to achieve this in real life. An article in the 21 Jul. 2006 issue of New York Times, page A14, “Scientists Hope to Unravel Neanderthal DNA and Human Mysteries” has an ethicist, Ronald Green of Dartmouth College, making use of plotlines from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, speculating on what would happen if we could recreate the full DNA of a Neanderthal man, clone such a man, and then somehow create a woman/mate that could breed. Yet, for female sperm, to date, both science and science fiction literature are silent.

One medical phenomenon which might have inspired stories of female sperm, but hasn't to date, is that of hermaphrodites. Hermaphroditism is a relatively unusual condition in which both ovarian and testicular tissues are present in the same individual, and sometimes in the same gonad (usually referred to as an ‘ovotestis’). About 1 in 4000 humans is born with the ambiguous sexual organ structure. Human hermaphrodites, also known as inter-sexed humans, are typically sterile, but in some cases can produce either sperm or eggs. That is, phenotypically female women have had their eggs fertilized to be mothers, while a few phenotypically male men have fathered children with their sperm. But what is generally impossible for humans (but well known for animals, such as snails) is for human hermaphrodites to have both viable sperm and eggs (procreative hermaphrodite animals typically have ovotestes which produce both sperm and eggs). One medical journal article did suggest that this would be possible for humans, allow in theory for a human hermaphrodite to reproduce by himself/herself, with the resulting child not genetically identical to the parent (see “Autoreproduction by Hermaphrodites”, J. Schulman and R. Sherins, Human Reproduction, March 1995, pages 500-1).

Human hermaphroditism was used in a classic science fiction time-travel story from 1959 titled All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein, a story about a man who is simultaneously his own mother, his own father and the bartender serving him drinks. It turns out the man started out life as an orphaned woman born with both sex organs and both organs being functional (which is generally impossible for humans). As a young woman, she/he has sex with a man, after which the doctors get rid of her female sex organs, making her a man (FIG. 3 contains excerpts from the story about this change), a man who later in life goes back in time to unknowingly have sex with himself as the young woman. Their daughter is mysteriously kidnapped by himself as the bartender who takes the baby girl further back in time and leaves her at the orphanage to become the young woman. While the story is a great example of the bizarre entertaining possibilities of time travel, and inspired much time-travel fiction writing (including, possibly, the 1969 science fiction story Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut), it inspired little to no sexual fiction writing because other than its existence, there is nothing really interesting about having two sets of sexual organs to in theory be able to produce both sperm and eggs. A few movies have made use of hermaphrodites as a plot element, including the 1996 movie Bleeders, and two movies were angels were portrayed as hermaphrodites: the 1995 movie The Prophecy and the 1999 movie Dogma. A few documentaries on hermaphrodites include the 1996 movies Hermaphrodites Speak! and The Blue Hermaphrodite.

One entertainment plot element that the prior art has missed is the ability to produce one type of sex cell when you only have sexual organs of the other type, e.g., making sperm from a woman's cells (or its parallel, male eggs), using novel and unobvious clinical techniques that are as ordinary as other reproductive techniques such as in vitro fertilization. A more specific embodiment of this plot element, and which is entertaining, shocking, interesting, etc. is a situation where all males are killed while ensuring the future reproductive health of civilization because of the availability of female sperm._Such plot elements can be used as functional components in entertainment articles of manufacture.

Problem

One explanation for the above-described lack of speculation or fantasy with regards to sperm from women or eggs from men, especially in regards to entertainment, and especially after the few mentions of female sperm around the time of the announcement of the Newcastle research, is due to the problem of the lack of any scientific biological pathway to actually create sperm from a woman's cells or eggs from a man's cells. Some scientific possibilities, such as female sperm, are so bizarre that the possibilities need some theoretical basis for non-scientists (such as scriptwriters) to imagine upon to then incorporate such possibilities into known entertainment motifs. Since no such theoretical basis for creating sperm from a woman's cells has been made public, it is not surprising that no one has used such an idea for entertainment purposes, especially in modern misogynistic and patriarchal societies.

While a possibility for sperm production from the cells of a woman surprised the vast majority of people in July 2006 when the Newcastle research was announced, to a very small number of developmental biology specialists and Vatican monitors around the world, this was old news, in light of a completely ignored sentence in two U.S. patents. In the early 1990s, two related U.S. patents from the University of Pennsylvania were filed (issuing as U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,858,354 and 6,215,039—“Repopulation of testicular seminiferous tubules with foreign cells, corresponding resultant germ cells, and corresponding resultant animals and progeny”—Brinster, et al.). At one point, the patents imply, but with no enabling disclosure, the possibility of sperm from a woman's cells (the patented process is for extracting, altering and transplanting a man's XY sperm cells for germline correction of genetic defects). However, the Brinster patents do not use the phrase “female sperm”; instead hinting at such a possibility with a sentence: “The use of female (XX) cells is also within the scope of the present invention.” Brinster and his colleagues probably avoided the use of the phrase “female sperm”, given the great controversies that would arise—(which could jeopardize their NIH grants), and distractingly used the more broader term

Interestingly, an author made use of this technique in a short story, but seven years before Brinster's publication. In 1985, science fiction writer David Zindell, in his story Shanidar (appearing in the compilation L. Ron Hubbard presents Writers of the Future), wrote “I irradiated his testes and bathed them with sonics, killing off the sperm . . . . So I went into his tubules and painstakingly sectioned out and mutated segments of his stem cells' DNA so that the newly produced germ cells would make for him sons after his new image.” Zindell, in his story, makes no mention of any application of this idea to making sperm for women, or the use of artificial chromosomes.

Additionally, because few scientists noticed this “female” statement in Brinster's patents, it did not occur to scientists to consider the possibility of combining Brinster's methods with the possibilities arising from an odd discovery some years later to then suggest the possibility of female sperm. In 2000, German scientists published a report in the biomedical journal Cytogenetic Cell Genetics (volume 91, pages 204 to 207) titled “An SRY-negative 47, XXY mother and daughter”, where they documented a healthy mother and daughter, both of whom had a SRY-negative 47, XXY karyotype (that is, their cells had that region of the Y chromosome that helps make sperm, but did not have that region of the Y chromosome that instructs the initially female body to become male). If you could clone such women, take some of their embryonic germ cells and used them along the lines of the methods of Brinster's technique, you have the possibility of producing sperm from a woman (a possibility further supported by the limited procreative abilities of 47,XXY Klinefelter men [men because they have the SRY gene]). Again, it is not surprising that since the scientists are not so speculating in the world of facts, then the entertainment inventors are not so speculating in the world of fiction. None of this science is mentioned, for example, in the 2006 medical text—The Sperm Cell: Production, Maturation, Fertilization, Regeneration (Christopher De Jonge and Christopher Barratt, editors, Cambridge University Press), which reviews much of the state of art of (human) sperm biology.

The non-enabling aspects of the Newcastle research and the earlier University of Pennsylvania research include problems due to the Y chromosome (which females do not possess in their cells, including that region of the Y chromosome that contributes to sperm production), and imprinting. However, in the last ten years, much progress has been made in the understanding and manipulation of human chromosomes and imprinting effects, techniques which can be used to invent biological pathways that lead to creating female sperm from a woman's cells. Pending patent applications, discussed below, address these non-enabling deficiencies for production of sperm from a woman's cells, and how to use these recently developed techniques.

Thus given the historic scientific impossibility of creating female sperm from a woman and thus its lack of discussion in scientific literature, and the social taboos involved with some concepts that empower women, to date there have been no entertainment products that make use of creating sperm from a woman's cells. Despite the obvious social tensions that will arise from such sperm, social tensions useful for inventing entertainment products, no such entertainment products exist. Since such entertainment products are useful for entertainment, investment and educational purposes, there is a need to invent and protect such products.

Also, while there are pending U.S. patent applications on entire movie plot structures (e.g., 2005/282140, 2005/270013, 2005/255437, 2005/240471—all titled “Process of relaying a story having a unique plot”), to date no one has tried to patent a functional movie plot element, with law review articles and other legal articles arguing to the contrary.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention provides, in one aspect, functional entertainment plot elements, plot structures and treatments based on the idea of female sperm and/or structures that use female sperm as a physical object that is manipulated by man and/or machine, and similarly for male eggs. In another aspect, the present invention provides articles of manufacture comprising an entertainment product that includes such entertainment plot elements, plot structures and methods of entertainment comprising experiencing an entertainment product that includes such entertainment plot elements and structures. Examples of articles of manufacture within the scope of the present invention include, but are not limited to, digital video discs (DVDs), compact disks (CDs), video tape, audio tape, vinyl records, paper (e.g., scripts and novels), and film. The entertainment product in accordance with the present invention can be experienced at home, on portable media players, or in theaters.

The present invention provides, in another aspect, methods to patent functional entertainment plot structures and treatments, for example, legal arguments useful for justifying such patenting under 35 U.S.C. 101.

In more specific aspects and embodiments, the present invention provides an entertainment product that includes at least one plot element that uses sperm created from the cells of a woman; and an entertainment product that includes at least one plot element that uses the process of creating sperm from the cells of a woman. In more specific embodiments, either of these entertainment products can be in the format of an audiovisual entertainment product, a fictional work, a drama, a movie, a recording, a play, or a comedy.

In another aspect, the present invention provides a method for providing an entertainment product, comprising providing tangible product of human creation, said tangible product of human creation having a plot element including at least one reference to sperm created from the cells of a woman, or to eggs created form the cells of a man.

In still another aspect, the present invention provides a patent application that includes at least one claim for a plot element.

Still other aspects and advantages provided by the invention will become apparent when the description below is read in conjunction with the accompanying figures and diagrams.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a list of uses of the phrase “female sperm” in printed literature.

FIG. 2 is text excerpts from a 2005 science fiction/mystery book.

FIG. 3 is text excerpts from the short story All You Zombies.

FIG. 4 is a data structure representing the Seven Samurai-based sub-genre.

FIG. 5 is a data structure of a comedy article of manufacture using female-derived sperm as a plot element.

FIG. 6 is a plot treatment using the data structure of FIG. 5.

FIG. 7 is a plot treatment of a mystery article of manufacture using female-derived sperm as a plot element.

FIG. 8 is a plot outline for the treatment depicted in FIGS. 5 and 6.

FIG. 9 is a plot outline for the treatment depicted in FIG. 7.

FIGS. 10-A, 10-B and 10-C are part of a script based on FIGS. 7 and 9.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

As used herein, “entertainment product” refers to any tangible product of human creation that depicts and illustrates a “story”, the entertainment product made available to users via a live performance, physical media (such as DVDs), television and/or radio signal broadcast, network transmission and/or other communication channels.

Illustrative examples of entertainment products in accordance with the invention include, but are not limited to, multimedia productions (e.g., movies, television shows, videos, advertisements, theater plays, recordings, and the like); artistic works (e.g., paintings, cartoons, and photographs); and literary works (e.g., publications and manuscripts). The story depicted and illustrated in the entertainment products can be fictional or expository in nature. Fictional works can be works such as novels, plays, epics, and lyrics; and include dramas and comedies. Expository works can be theoretical or practical, and include, but are not limited to, historical, scientific, and philosophical works.

As used herein, the following structural relationships are assumed: a “story” (also referred to as a “work”, as in work fixed in expression) is one “plot” or a combination of “plots” that have functional interrelationships based on common “plot elements”; a “plot” is a structured set of “scenes” that have functional interrelationships based on common “plot elements”; a “scene” is a structured set of one or more “plot elements”; and a “plot element” is either a physical setting (the environment of the scene), a character (e.g., a human, a robot, an animal, etc.), a physical object/feature (e.g., a car, a gun, female sperm, etc.), a physical event (e.g., a transformation of a character or object), or a physical message (e.g., dialog where one character communicates—speaks, emails, uses sign language, etc.—to another character or directly to viewers of the entertainment work [e.g., the type of post-modem self-referential audience inclusion made popular by Bob Hope, for example, in his 1942 movie My Favorite Blonde)]. The function of the physical plot element is to induce a specifiable aesthetic effect in the user/viewer/listener of the entertainment work.

By “plot structure” we mean a sequence or combination of plot elements not necessarily contiguous in time or location, with such functional structures described either as unstructured text and/or embedded in data structures or

The phrase “treatment” (also referred to as a “synopsis” or “format”) as used herein means concrete, tangible, and useful descriptions of the main plot elements included in an entertainment product such as a movie or television show in particular those plot elements that are novel and/or unobvious, with or without samples of dialog. Treatments in the entertainment industry are typically a few pages of unstructured text, but can also appear in the form of functional data structures. Treatments can also set forth the framework of a serial or episodic series within which the central running characters will operate and which framework is intended to be repeated in each episode, the setting, theme, premise or general plot structure of the proposed serial or episodic series and the central running characters which are distinct and identifiable, including detailed characterizations and the interplay of such characters. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) maintains the current industry-standard for formats and terms for their licensing. FIG. 6 and FIG. 7 are examples of treatments. Treatments are usually two to four pages in length.

The phrase “outline” as used herein means a specification of a “story” more detailed than a treatment, but less detailed than a script. For example, outlines can be viewed as scripts without much dialog—settings, actions, some dialog. Outlines are usually ten to twelve pages in length, but can be longer or shorter. FIGS. 8 and 9 are examples of outlines.

The phrase “script” as used herein means a detailed functional specification of the actions, processes and physical objects in the form of “plot elements” that comprise a “story” depicted by an entertainment product such as a (stage) play, film/motion picture, radio, television show or other entertainment product. Scripts can have the same structural relationships as a story, having one or more plots that can be related by common plot elements, and having one or more scenes that can be related by common plot elements. The specification can be the traditional printed script, or as represented in script software tools. As noted in the Encyclopedia Britannica (15^th ed., 1998), “The nature of scripts varies from those that give only a brief outline of the action to detailed shooting scripts, in which every action, gesture and implication is explicitly stated. Frequently, scripts are not in chronological order, but in the order most convenient for filming. Their language approximates the patterns of ordinary speech.” The sequence of actions in a script do not necessarily need to contain dialog (though the vast majority do), as specifically demonstrated in Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words I and II, and Noh theater in general. Like software, scripts can be embedded (a television show within a movie as a script within a script—the 1998 Truman Show). Scripts can accompany the entertainment product when it is distributed, for example, including a shooting script linked to image sequences on a distribution DVD for manipulation by the viewer. Scripts are typically 90 to 120 pages in length, each page typically representing a minute of display time, resulting in an entertainment work 90 to 120 minutes long, typical for theater and television movies. But scripts can be longer or shorter to result in entertainment works longer than 120 minutes or shorter than 90 minutes. Examples of scripts can be found at the online database, the Internet Movie Script Database.

For example, FIG. 4, in one use, is a structured and functional treatment for a family of entertainment products based on the classic 1954 movie Seven Samurai by Akiro Kurosawa (discussed in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/246,947, which application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety and for all purposes). Also, since FIG. 4 is useful for generating a family of entertainment products, a sub-genre of entertainment, FIG. 4 is also useful as a data structure representing a sub-genre. The specific entertainment idea specified by FIG. 4 is that of one group of bad men, redeeming themselves at some loss of life, by saving a good group of people from the attacks of a second group of bad men—an entertainment idea pretty much invented by Kurosawa who combined elements of American Western movies with Japanese samurai movies.

Before specifying the plot elements, plot structures, treatments, outlines and scripts (all five also jointly referred to herein as “PPTOS”) disclosed herein, we first specify legal business methods for establishing the patentability of functional PPTOSes. To demonstrate such patentability, one or more of the following actions, and their equivalents, can be combined in a variety of sequences:

• • citing the Supreme Court decision Baker v. Selden to establish that artistic processes (and therefore products) are patentable;
  • citing the CAFC decision Datamize v. Plumtree Software to establish that aesthetic elements (such as plot elements) of a process or product can be claimed where defined;
  • citing the PTO BPAI decision Ex parte Lundgren to establish that non-technological processes (and therefore products) are patentable;
  • citing entertainment and academic practices to establish that PPTOSes are concrete and useful citing caselaw to establish that treatments and plot structures are concrete and useful properties;
  • citing entertainment and academic practices to establish that PPTOSes are beneficial (and/or perceptible) and thus tangible;
  • citing the CAFC decision AT&T v. Excel Communications to establish that dialog, as a set of words, is patentable as a signal;
  • citing the CAFC decision State Street Bank v. Signature Financial to establish that concrete, useful and tangible processes or products are patentable;
  • citing the CCPA decision In re Hruby to establish that patentable artistic products can be hand-made or machine-made;
  • citing the CAFC decision In re Lowry to establish that printed matter useful to a machine is patentable;
  • citing the CAFC decision In re Lowry to establish that (semiotic) data structures are patentable;
  • citing the CAFC decision In re Alappat to establish that (semiotic) algorithms are patentable;
  • citing the CAFC decision In re Toma to establish that (semiotic) grammars are patentable;
  • citing the Supreme Court decision TrafFix Devices to establish that PPTOSes are functional.

The next four paragraphs are one such combination of legal actions to establish the patentability of PPTOSes.

To be useful (in light of current PTO examination guidelines), PPTOSes must be specific, substantial and credible. That PPTOSes have been the subject of state and federal lawsuits means that they are so specific, substantial and credible. One useful function of treatments and plot structures is for engineering and producing full scripts using plot elements as components, scripts which as business methods are useful for engineering and producing entertainment products such as a movie. To be concrete (in light of current PTO examination guidelines), PPTOSes must be useful in repeatable or reproducible ways. Such functional usefulness is enabled with the detailed descriptions below. That treatments, plot structures and scripts are concrete and useful property also follows from early decisions such as Stanley v. Columbia Broadcasting (1948), Hamilton National Bank v. Belt (1953), O'Brien v. RKO Radio Pictures (1946), Yadkoe v. Fields (1944) and Italiani v. MGM Corporation (1941), all of which are rulings on the concrete and useful nature of treatments (and thus the concrete and useful nature of more detailed properties such as scripts) as a form of protected property.

That physical PPTOSes are beneficial (and thus tangible in light of PTO examination guidelines) can be seen in that they are routinely bought and sold in the entertainment industry, often for large sums of money; and that there are numerous university courses and seminars on how to invent and engineer such structures. Such monies are not paid if there is no benefit to the acquirer. Even the use of an image as a plot element is very financial beneficial. In the 2006 movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the logo of the Wonder Bread wrapper appeared for about 11 minutes, giving the logo owners the equivalent of millions of dollars in media exposure via product placement in a movie (New York Times Magazine, Sep. 17, 2006, p. 31). That such business transactions typically require the involvement of an intellectual property lawyer to clearly specify economic rights and conditions with regards to the exploitation of PPTOSes further supports their beneficial nature, and thus their tangibility. For those arguing the perception viewpoint of tangibility, given that PPTOSes are perceptible enough to attract purchase offers, in some cases multi-million dollar purchase offers, means that they are tangible.

Essential to treatments, outlines, plot structures and scripts are functional combinations of physical plot elements—e.g., characters, messages (e.g., dialog), objects, events (e.g., movement) and imagery (e.g., settings). The plot elements are used to inform and stimulate a biophysical response from the user of the entertainment article/product with regards to specifiable aesthetic results associated with the plot elements that affect the quality of the article. This essential role for plot elements (and PPTOSes in general) with regards to use and quality of entertainment articles, e.g., through their repeatable ability to effect a biophysical response (e.g., an emotion) from the use of such articles, makes plot elements functional (see TrafFix Devices v. Marketing Displays, 532 U.S. 23 at 32 [2001]).

Thus as artistic (Baker v. Selden, Supreme Court, 1879) and/or definably aesthetic (Datamize v. Plumtree Software, CAFC, 2005), technological or non-technological (Ex parte Lundgren, USPTO, 2005) concrete, tangible and useful processes and products and business methods (State Street v. Signature Financial, CAFC, 1995), made by hand or with the aid of machinery (In re Hruby, CCPA, 1967), such functional (TrafFix, S.C. 2001) products such as plot elements, plot structures, treatments and scripts are patentable, where they satisfy 35 U.S.C. 102, 103 and 112, especially if such products are represented in (semiotic) data structure (In re Lowry, CAFC, 1994), algorithm (In re Alappat, CAFC, 1994) and/or grammar form (In re Toma, CAFC, 1978). Additional methods and legal arguments for patenting entertainment products such as movies and televisions shows, including movies and television shows based on new biological discoveries, is disclosed in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/246,947 incorporated herein by reference above. Such treatments and plot structures are functional high level abstractions, used to make products such as movies—with movies being useful articles of manufacture—no different than any other industry where high level abstractions and their corresponding products are specified and claimed (for example, the software industry).

That words (combined to construct dialog relevant to plot elements) are functional follows directly from words and phrases functioning as useful signals other than to signal their normal/literal meaning—as tropes. There are a wide variety of tropes: anthimeria, euphemism, hyperbole, irony, litotes, meiosis, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, paradox, pun, simile and synecdoche. For example, a classic oxymoron is “military intelligence” used in a way to signal to the audience that you don't think the military is very intelligent; “competent copyright lawyer” is another oxymoron if you arguing that 17 U.S.C. 102 is an ill-defined mathematical absurdity, since few if any copyright lawyers are competent in the mathematics of ideas and expressions.

The precedent of words and phrases as functional useful signals has been relied upon in caselaw. For example, the 1999 CAFC decision AT&T v. Excel Communications (172 F.3d 1352), where in referring to the use of the abbreviated phrase ‘e.g.’, the court writes: “The ‘e.g.’ signal denotes an example, not an exclusive requirement.”, that is, a word or phrase is a signal, written in light of decades of legal precedent that signals are patentable. This functional view of the usefulness of words is consistent with the science of semiotics in which all of the arts and literature are functional and structural.

Another argument for the patentability of plot elements—e.g., characters, messages (e.g., dialog), objects, events (e.g., movement) and imagery (e.g., settings)—is that all of these objects are useful to machines, i.e., can be manipulated, transformed and manufactured by computer programs, which is possible in part due to the functionality of words and their structural combinations. This usefulness exempts their patentability from any application of the archaic printed matter doctrine. As In re Lowry states: “The printed matter cases ‘dealt with claims defining as the invention certain novel arrangements of printed lines or characters, useful and intelligible only to the human mind’. In re Bernhart”.

In recent decades, a growing number of software tools for processing collections of texts, such as PPTOSes, have been developed. For example, one program can analyze a plot structure from a given text having a recognizable plot structures and automatically complete it to form a story. Another program can take a script and generate shooting camera angles. Such tools make PPTOSes not only “intelligible only to the human mind”, but also functionally transformable by computers to produce industrially useful results, making PPTOSes “intelligible” outside of the human mind. Thus intelligible, PPTOSes rise above abstract printed matter, and thus are patentable (see In re Lowry, 32 F.2d 1579 [CAFC 1994] where it cites In re Bernhart, 417 F.2d 1395 [CCPA 1969]).

In general, as long as there is new science to be discovered, there will be new scientific ideas and actions useful for being entertainment plot elements, and their structured combinations. Given the economic value of new entertainment ideas, patent applicants should seek patent protection for the entertainment use of their new scientific ideas, especially if the new ideas are patentable. For example, claims of new inventions can claim the entertainment use of the new invention, for example, an independent claim for an article of manufacture or method, and dependent claims for entertainment uses:

• • “1. A sperm cell containing the X chromosome of a woman.”
  • “2. The sperm cell of claim 1 used as an entertainment plot element.”
    • or
  • “1. A method for manufacturing female sperm comprising . . . . ”
  • “2. The method of claim 1 used as an entertainment plot element.”
    or purely independent claims where the entertainment article of manufacture or method uses the new article of manufacture or method as a plot element:
  • “1. An entertainment product comprising (or depicting) the use of XY as a plot element.”
    • or
  • “1. An entertainment product comprising (or depicting) the use of the process for manufacturing XY as a plot element.”

For example, “XY” could be inventions such as “sperm from the cells of a woman”, “ceramic high temperature superconductor” or “cancer-proof cell”. Some of these claims are useful for providing intellectual property protection where copyright is prohibited from doing so (17 USC 102(b) prohibits copyright protection for any depictions of processes, systems, etc. “regardless of form”). An entertainment use of a new useful invention is no less useful than the usefulness of the invention in other applications. This usefulness, this utility, is reflected in the entertainment industry being a very large industrial sector of the American and global economies.

The Science of Female Sperm

The phrase “female sperm” as used herein, or “female-derived sperm”, means the type of sperm with an X chromosome created from the cells of a SRY-negative woman. In other words, the phrases “female sperm” and “female-derived sperm” as used herein refer to sperm that carry the genetic information of a woman, not a man. The term “SRY-negative” is used to distinguish “biologically normal” women from socially-recognized “women” such as men-to-women transsexuals/transvestites, and phenotypically female hermaphrodites and/or 46XX/46XY chimeras, most of whom have outwardly female appearances (naturally or surgically) while being born with the/some/no ability to generate sperm with the bodily organs. If necessary, one further distinction is that the sperm be created from the cells of a human with a normal RSPO1 gene (which promotes ovary growth—when defective, testes growth dominates); this gene test distinguishes a few men with male sex organs but a XX genotype.

Some patents (such as U.S. Pat. No. 6,819,411 and US2005/081256) and medical references use the phrase “female sperm”, but only in the sense of natural sperm cells with an X chromosome from the cells of a man (e.g., when juxtaposed with the term “male sperm” that refers to natural sperm cells with a Y chromosome from a man). Similarly, searching the Medline/PubMed database for references to “female sperm” return no references to articles describing sperm derived from the cells of a woman, but rather only for sperm derived from the cells of a man. There are a variety of news reports, product announcements and medical journal articles that mention man-derived female sperm in the context of sorting man-derived male sperm from man-derived female sperm (“sexed sperm”). The methods disclosed herein also can make use of the phrase “woman sperm”, or “woman-derived sperm”.

A co-pending U.S. patent application, Ser. No. ______ (Attorney Docket No. GREG006_US) filed on even date herewith and incorporated by reference in its entirety and for all purposes, describes and claims methods for producing female sperm using cells from a woman. The production methods are based on altering certain types of a woman's (cloned) germ/stem cells with artificial SRY-deficient Y chromosome to allow the altered cells to undergo spermatogenesis, and then cultivating such cells, in vivo or in vitro, to produce quantities of female sperm. For example, one method makes use of the following steps:

• a) clone an adult woman,
• b) extract germ cells from the woman's embryo at any point where their imprinting is mostly erased,
• c) (optionally) cultivate the extracted cells in vitro (mitotic divisions),
• d) add artificial SRY-deficient Y chromosomes to the extracted cells,
• e) (optionally) cultivate the altered cells in vitro, and
• f) inject the altered cells into the chemically sterilized testes of a man, where the injected cells undergo normal spermatogenesis (meiotic divisions).

The SRY gene instructs the initially female embryo to develop as a male, with the gene contributing little to nothing in regards to sperm production.

Such sperm from a woman's cells can then be used to fertilize eggs from another woman, achieving same-sex procreation, the possibility of which, when combined with caselaw such as Lovings v. Virginia, leads to a constitutional basis for same-sex marriage and the theological demotion of the phrase “Honor Your Mother and Father”, the consequences of which will provide new opportunities for entertainment.

The above-incorporated co-pending U.S. patent application, Ser. No. ______ (Attorney Docket No. GREG006_US) also discloses methods for producing male eggs. Such male eggs can also be used as plot elements in many of the ways disclosed herein for female sperm, plus others, as will be appreciated by those having ordinary skill in the art.

Entertainment Use of Female Sperm

Female sperm, and steps in the biomedical processes used to produce such sperm from a woman's cells, can be used as a plot element in a variety of entertainment sub-genres, including comedy, religious, conflict, horror and family situations. A plurality of plot elements based on the idea of, processes for, and use of female sperm in a variety of entertainment sub-genres are described below.

Specific Scene Actions for all Entertainment Genres

In general, one or more of the following exemplary specific action scenes listed in Table 1, and other scenes, can be combined to create an entertainment multimedia product using female sperm as a scene's plot element, across many genres and sub-genres, including those disclosed. In addition, most, if not all, of the following action scenes can be adapted to use male eggs as a functional plot elements by analogy, as will be understood by persons having ordinary skill in the art.

TABLE 1
depicting with a video, and/or animation, a sperm entering an egg
creating female sperm using samples of a woman's cells
displaying graphics of the structure and development of female sperm
discussing the science of the X and Y sex chromosomes
depositing female sperm in a sperm bank
using a genetic testing device that detects female sperm
using female sperm to fertilize an egg
transporting a female sperm and/or other sperm samples
delivering a baby girl by a woman
testifying at a Congressional hearing on the issue of creating female sperm
filing female sperm patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
interviewing political and religious figures on the controversy of female
sperm
a sperm whale breaching the ocean surface
comparing sperm sizes and shapes across species with a series of images
entertaining an audience with sarcastic news comments about female
sperm, by comedians such as Jon Stewart of cable television's
The Daily Show
displaying outdoor imagery of biomedical companies and university
laboratories in biotech and gay rights bastions of San Francisco and
Boston
naming a female sperm-related biotech company Cave of Yenga
depicting a very light skinned woman and a very dark skinned woman
walking hand-in-hand with a young girl between them, the young girl
having an intermediate skin color between the two women, with the young
girl optionally wearing a T-shirt with the message “Honor your mother
and mother”
famous female entertainers such as Madonna, Angelina Jolie, announcing
their plans to have sperm prepared from their cells

Such exemplary specific action scenes, alone and in functional combination with other scenes, can then be used to manufacture an entertainment process description (e.g., as embodied in the form of a script), a description useful for producing an artistic and/or aesthetic article of manufacture, as well as a process for stimulating a biophysical response from a user of such article of manufacture. A structured organization of such functional components (e.g., the specific scenes) credibly specifies the article of manufacture, with one or more such components having functional (e.g., intertextual) relationships (for example, a specific scene of sperm being switched in a sperm bank is functionally dependent on an earlier scene of sperm being deposited in a sperm bank). Such functional relationships affect the quality of the entertainment article by effecting a biophysical response from a user of the entertainment article.

Such actions comprising the entertainment process are depicted and illustrated with plot elements (dialog, objects, movement, imagery, etc.) that, as useful signals, also function to inform and stimulate the user of the entertainment article/product with regards to specifiable and repeatable aesthetic results that affect the quality of the article.

Specific Scene Actions for Comedy Entertainment Products

One example of an entertainment product made in accordance with the present invention includes a scene where a woman is in labor, showing signs of pain and exertion, finally giving birth to a healthy, beautiful child. Everyone in the delivery room is smiling with joy—until the mother sees the baby's penis and exclaims “where's my daughter?!!” setting the stage for a plot element based on sperm samples being switched either at a sperm bank or insemination clinic.

In other examples of the entertainment products made in accordance with the present invention, one or more of the following exemplary specific action scenes using female sperm as a plot element listed in Table 2, and other scenes, can be combined to create an entertainment comedy product (though these scenes can also be used to create entertainment products in other genres, including those disclosed herein). In addition, most, if not all, of the following action scenes can be adapted to use male eggs as a functional plot elements by analogy, as will be understood by persons having ordinary skill in the art.

TABLE 2
switching, either accidentally or deliberately, a female sperm sample
a female-sperm procreated embryo developing with a shot of its penis
delivering a baby boy to a woman expecting a daughter
filing lawsuits based on the switched female sperm samples, and similar
legal activities
searching for which embryo was fertilized using a woman's sperm
adding green fluorescence protein (GFP) genes to female germ cells and
sperm, with later scenes depicting the babies born from such sperm being
able to glow in the dark
dressing up as female sperm for marching in a gay pride parade, such as
sperm in dresses
displaying a scene in the 1972 movie “Everything You Wanted To Know
About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask” where Woody Allen is dressed up
as a sperm about to be ejaculated
interviewing a mother and her female-spermed daughter on television
shows, for example, female-oriented shows as Oprah
offering the women in the audience free sperm preparation packages
on talk shows such as Oprah
depicting scenes for a play/movie titled Waiting For Opradot about two
strippers waiting for a woman named Opradot to bring them news about
something special for their lives, such as female sperm
joking about female sperm by late-night television comedians such as Jon
Stewart, Jay Leno and David Lettermen
inventing female sperm for lesbians in order for the male heterosexual
inventor to be introduced to the lesbian's heterosexual female friends
auctioning female sperm on Internet sites such as eBay
training dogs to sniff out female sperm being smuggled into the
United States
trading female sperm technology with human-like female aliens who come
to Earth with male control technology
detecting when men are lying, e.g., by women born from female sperm

Such exemplary specific action scenes, alone and in functional combination with other scenes, can then be used to manufacture an entertainment process description (e.g., as embodied in the form of a script), a description useful for producing an artistic and/or aesthetic article of manufacture, as well as a process for stimulating a biophysical response from a user of such article of manufacture. A structured organization of such functional components (e.g., the specific scenes) credibly specifies the article of manufacture, with one or more such components having functional (e.g., intertextual) relationships (for example, a specific scene of sperm being switched in a sperm bank is functionally dependent on an earlier scene of sperm being deposited in a sperm bank). Such functional relationships affect the quality of the entertainment article by effecting a biophysical response from a user of the entertainment article.

Such actions comprising the entertainment process are depicted and illustrated with plot elements (dialog, objects, movement, imagery, etc.) that, as useful signals, also function to inform and stimulate the user of the entertainment article/product with regards to specifiable and repeatable aesthetic results that affect the quality of the article.

FIG. 5 is a data structure representing a comedy article of manufacture using female-derived sperm as a plot element. FIG. 6 is plot treatment using the data structure of FIG. 5. FIG. 8 is a plot outline based on the data structure and texts of FIGS. 5 and 6.

Specific Scene Actions for Religious/Legal Entertainment Products

One of the classic science-versus-religion movies is the classic 1960 movie To Inherit the Wind about a trial in the Tennessee state courts in 1925, where a teacher was convicted of teaching the theory of evolution. The many religious controversies that female sperm will generate allow the creation of a variety of religious entertainment products, for example, a movie titled To Inherit Female Sperm about mothers who want to their daughters born using sperm created from the mothers' cells to inherit the gene that enables sperm production. One reason to treat religious and legal entertainment products together is that they both exalt form over substance (which is why they are very amenable to use in entertainment products).

In other examples of the entertainment products made in accordance with the present invention, one or more of the following exemplary specific action scenes using female sperm as a plot element listed in Table 3, and other scenes, can be combined to create an entertainment religious product (though these scenes can also be used to create entertainment products in other genres, including those disclosed herein). In addition, most, if not all, of the following action scenes can be adapted to use male eggs as a functional plot elements by analogy, as will be understood by persons having ordinary skill in the art.

TABLE 3
informing a religiously conservative man that his sperm was mistakenly
used by a couple of lesbians seeking a daughter using their female sperm
arguing the morality of female sperm by citing its positive use in the New
Testament
arguing that all “sperm drops” must be from (Islamic) men, since female
sperm is not in the Koran
arguing that a female sperm insults the male Hindu sperm god Skanda
displaying anti female-sperm signs, e.g., by religious protesters
releasing an official condemnation of female sperm at a news conference
sponsored by a religious organization
discussing at a Congressional hearing the federal funding of any research
that supports the science of female sperm, such as NIH stem cell research
reading a Vatican statement condemning “unnatural female sperm”, and/or
excommunicating researchers of female sperm
debating the truth of the religious passages such as “Honor your mother
and father” in light of female sperm procreation - “Honor your mother and
mother?”
arguing from Mormon scripture that a white female sperm should not mix
with a black female's egg (and that two women doing so should be killed)
testifying at a same-sex marriage court case, e.g., by female-sperm
researchers
challenging female sperm patents in court, typically by religious groups
removing Sarah's seminal emission passage from the New Testament
assassinating the winner of Novel Prize in biology for achieving the first
female sperm baby, typically by a religious fanatic
arguing that if women who are genotypically women yet can make female
sperm are still legally women, then transsexual men who are mostly
phenotypically women and can make sperm are legally women as well
passing a law (or issuing a religious edict) making illegal/heretical the
use of mammalian artificial chromosomes (e.g., to make female sperm)
filing a lawsuit arguing in light of same sex procreation using female
sperm, that the court decision Lovings v. Virginia is directly relevant
for the issue of same sex marriage

Such exemplary specific action scenes, alone and in functional combination with other scenes, can then be used to manufacture an entertainment process description (e.g., as embodied in the form of a script), a description useful for producing an artistic and/or aesthetic article of manufacture, as well as a process for stimulating a biophysical response from a user of such article of manufacture. A structured organization of such functional components (e.g., the specific scenes) credibly specifies the article of manufacture, with one or more such components having functional (e.g., intertextual) relationships (for example, a specific scene of sperm being switched in a sperm bank is functionally dependent on an earlier scene of sperm being deposited in a sperm bank). Such functional relationships affect the quality of the entertainment article by effecting a biophysical response from a user of the entertainment article.

Such actions comprising the entertainment process are depicted and illustrated with plot elements (dialog, objects, movement, imagery, etc.) that, as useful signals, also function to inform and stimulate the user of the entertainment article/product with regards to specifiable and repeatable aesthetic results that affect the quality of the article.

Specific Scene Actions for Horror/Science Fiction Entertainment Products

In other examples of the entertainment products made in accordance with the present invention, one or more of the following exemplary specific action scenes using female sperm as a plot element listed in Table 4, and other scenes, can be combined to create a horror or science fiction product (though these scenes can also be used to create entertainment products in other genres, including those disclosed herein). In addition, most, if not all, of the following action scenes can be adapted to use male eggs as a functional plot elements by analogy, as will be understood by persons having ordinary skill in the art.

TABLE 4
exuding a virus deadly to men by women procreated from female sperm,
e.g., a virus that destroys any cell containing the SRY gene, which
only men have
using the few remaining men (nicknamed the “mAndrodios”) as incubators
to produce female sperm, in a future where most men have been killed
using transgenic chimpanzees to produce human female sperm, eliminating
the need for men
sterilizing all men when they reach puberty, and assigning each man to
one woman to be her sperm factory
testing and killing all boys when they start being able to produce
non-female sperm
kidnapping men to replace their germ cells with germ cells created from
cells from women (so that the man's testicles forever make only
female sperm)
kidnapping men to remove one of their testicles to be used as in-vitro
female sperm “factories”
removing a testicle from a man, and implanting the testicle in woman to be
used as her sperm “factory”
making human artificial Y chromosomes from some of the Y-genes of a
chimpanzee
preparing female sperm for a future pope/rabbi/ayatollah named Sarah
voting, in a future world dominated by women, by a group of female
religious leaders, in Lyons France, that men are still human by a vote of
69-13 (even though mens' non-female sperm is not needed)
kidnapping notable female conservatives, and without their knowledge,
removing some of their cells to make female sperm and/or eggs,
procreating daughters from these cells who undergo accelerated growth
while being indoctrinated against the evils of their host mothers' religious
and social beliefs, training these daughters as a squad called Deuts-22:20
to hunt down their host mothers and stone them to death

Such exemplary specific action scenes, alone and in functional combination with other scenes, can then be used to manufacture an entertainment process description (e.g., as embodied in the form of a script), a description useful for producing an artistic and/or aesthetic article of manufacture, as well as a process for stimulating a biophysical response from a user of such article of manufacture. A structured organization of such functional components (e.g., the specific scenes) credibly specifies the article of manufacture, with one or more such components having functional (e.g., intertextual) relationships (for example, a specific scene of sperm being switched in a sperm bank is functionally dependent on an earlier scene of sperm being deposited in a sperm bank). Such functional relationships affect the quality of the entertainment article by effecting a biophysical response from a user of the entertainment article.

Such actions comprising the entertainment process are depicted and illustrated with plot elements (dialog, objects, movement, imagery, etc.) that, as useful signals, also function to inform and stimulate the user of the entertainment article/product with regards to specifiable and repeatable aesthetic results that affect the quality of the article.

Specific Scene Actions for Mystery/Action Fiction Entertainment Products

In other examples of the entertainment products made in accordance with the present invention, one or more of the following exemplary specific action scenes using female sperm as a plot element listed in Table 5, and other scenes, can be combined to create an entertainment mystery product (though these scenes can also be used to create entertainment products in other genres, including those disclosed herein). In addition, most, if not all, of the following action scenes can be adapted to use male eggs as a functional plot elements by analogy, as will be understood by persons having ordinary skill in the art.

TABLE 5
stealing female sperm samples from sperm banks
kidnapping/murdering researchers in the field of female sperm
manipulation
saving female sperm researchers from being kidnapped/murdered
picketing and/or bombing laboratories and corporations where female
sperm researched is being conducted
seeking secret lesbian research facilities where female sperm techniques
are being developed, e.g., by spies from religious empires
monitoring Internet emails by a mysterious (government, religious)
agency for any message containing, for example, “germ” and “female”
and “MACs”

Such exemplary specific action scenes, alone and in functional combination with other scenes, can then be used to manufacture an entertainment process description (e.g., as embodied in the form of a script), a description useful for producing an artistic and/or aesthetic article of manufacture, as well as a process for stimulating a biophysical response from a user of such article of manufacture. A structured organization of such functional components (e.g., the specific scenes) credibly specifies the article of manufacture, with one or more such components having functional (e.g., intertextual) relationships (for example, a specific scene of sperm being switched in a sperm bank is functionally dependent on an earlier scene of sperm being deposited in a sperm bank). Such functional relationships affect the quality of the entertainment article by effecting a biophysical response from a user of the entertainment article.

Such actions comprising the entertainment process are depicted and illustrated with plot elements (dialog, objects, movement, imagery, etc.) that, as useful signals, also function to inform and stimulate the user of the entertainment article/product with regards to specifiable and repeatable aesthetic results that affect the quality of the article.

FIG. 7 is a plot treatment for a mystery article of manufacture using female-derived sperm as a plot element. FIG. 9 is a plot outline based on FIG. 7. A patent abstract for a patent for such a movie could read in part as follows:

“Their Kisses Kill” is a story of biotech intrigue, female power and a secret religious legacy. In the near future, a virus outbreak spreads across California. Its ravaging symptoms lead to painful deaths only for men. Government agents uncover a secret enclave of scientific/artistic nuns devoted to the science of female-only procreation—fatherless daughters born using female sperm. The virus is accidently triggered (or by design?) by the genetics of female sperm. As state and church authorities (including a resurrected order of Knights Templar) hunt down and attack the nuns, they are rescued and their foes defeated by an ancient order of warrior nuns in Europe who vow to restore female/male equality in religions worldwide, now with the help of the scientific nuns.

FIGS. 10-A, 10-B and 10-C are part of a script based on FIGS. 7 and 9.

Business Method: Licensing Patent and Provisional Rights to Entertainment Products

The entertainment products provided by the present invention can also be the subjects of various business transactions, i.e., as methods of doing business. Under Title 35 of the United States Code, anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers to sell, or imports an entertainment product based on the idea of female sperm claimed herein is liable for patent infringement as of the date of publication of this patent application (provisional rights), as is for any uses after any patent that issues based on ideas disclosed herein. Thus, the owner of the patent or provisional rights can license or sell one or more rights to practice the invention herein to third parties as a means of generating revenue. Thus, the present invention further provides novel business methods comprising the license or sale of one or more rights to a patent that claims at least one entertainment product based on female sperm.

For example, the assignee for any patent or patents reading on the ideas disclosed herein is can offer the following licensing terms, to be subject to a formal contract: in return for using the idea of female sperm as a plot element, the assignee will be compensated an amount equal to 1% of the development budget and 5% of the gross income; and the inventor will be given final authority over any dialog.

Business Method: Patent Applications for Functional Plot Elements

Another business method is the preparation of patent applications, such as patent applications for functional plot elements as provided by the present invention. For those wishing to patent their own new plot elements, they can prepare patent applications with disclosures (e.g., abstract, figures, detailed description, claims) similar to the disclosures appearing herein. For patenting a plot element based on a new invention, disclosures similar to the disclosures herein can be incorporated into a patent application for the new invention.

For example, a patent application for a new plot element could be prepared by having the traditional patent application structure, comprising one or more of the following sections of a patent application: abstract, background of the invention, summary of the invention, brief description of the drawings, detailed description of the invention, drawings and claims. Examples of these sections of a patent application in the context of patenting a plot element are disclosed herein.

The background section of patent application disclosed herein is a good example of how to deal with a major challenge in patenting functional plot elements—distinguishing around the prior art. Given millennium of existing plot elements, there will be prior art problems similar to those experienced in other crowded areas of technology such as software and business methods. As the background section disclosed herein demonstrates, there are ample prior art resources (such as Internet search engines and academic databases) for searching the prior art as well as for other areas of technology. Any prior art found can then be distinguished in the background section, such distinguishing being easier for plot elements based on new scientific and engineering inventions (such as female sperm).

While the patent application disclosed herein includes a lengthy analysis of the statutory compatibility of patenting functional plot elements, others preparing plot patent applications may choose to include just a short statutory analysis, or incorporate by reference part or all of the content of the disclosure of present patent application. Nevertheless, a disclosure should include many examples of the functional uses of the new plot element (as done, for example, herein) in view of the general trend in patent caselaw that “the more you disclose, the more you can protect”.

Figures similar to the figures disclosed herein can be included in the patent application: data structures showing use of the plot element, parts of stories and scripts showing use of the plot element, etc. Additionally, methods of illustration of plot elements, as discussed in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/246,947 for claiming entertainment sub-genres, can also be used in patent applications for movie plot elements.

Patent claims similar to those disclosed here can be used: “An entertainment product that includes at least one plot element that XXX.”, where XXX is a description of the functional use of the plot element, for example, “ . . . uses sperm created from the cells of a woman”, or “is the activities of a ruggedly good looking patent buster in San Francisco who likes donuts”, the latter description being an example of the narrowness needed for some plot elements to satisfy novelty and obviousness requirements.

Although various specific embodiments and examples have been described herein, those having ordinary skill in the art will understand that many different implementations of the invention can be achieved without departing from the spirit or scope of this disclosure.

Claims

1. An entertainment product that includes at least one plot element that uses sperm created from the cells of a woman.

2. The entertainment product of claim 1, wherein said entertainment product is an audiovisual entertainment product.

3. The entertainment product of claim 1, wherein said entertainment product is a fictional work.

4. The entertainment product of claim 1, wherein said entertainment product is a drama.

5. The entertainment product of claims 1, wherein said entertainment product is a movie.

6. The entertainment product of claims 1, wherein said entertainment product is a recording.

7. The entertainment product of claims 1, wherein said entertainment product is a play.

8. The entertainment product of claims 1, wherein said entertainment product is a comedy.

9. An entertainment product that includes at least one plot element that uses the process of creating sperm from the cells of a woman.

10. The entertainment product of claim 9, wherein said entertainment product is an audiovisual entertainment product.

11. The entertainment product of claims 9, wherein said entertainment product is a fictional work.

12. The entertainment product of claims 9, wherein said entertainment product is a drama.

13. The entertainment product of claims 9, wherein said entertainment product is a movie.

14. The entertainment product of claims 9, wherein said entertainment product is a recording.

15. The entertainment product of claims 9, wherein said entertainment product is a play.

16. The entertainment product of claims 9, wherein said entertainment product is a comedy.

17. A method for providing an entertainment product, comprising providing tangible product of human creation, said tangible product of human creation having a plot element of claim 1.

18. A method for providing an entertainment product, comprising providing tangible product of human creation, said tangible product of human creation having a plot element of claim 9.

19. A patent application that includes at least one claim for a plot element.

20. A patent application that includes at least one claim for a plot element of claim 1.