(Today we had to take a word that jumped out at us off the 29th page of the book nearest to us and write based on that. The twist is to write it like a letter. My word was “planning.” Assignment’s here: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_assignment/writing-101-day-fourteen/)
I stared at the email, and rubbed my eyes. Maybe I was just really tired. I read it again.
Nope, hadn’t changed.
Maybe my boss had just been tired when he wrote it? The time stamp said he’d sent it past one a.m. Not exactly prime thinking time.
Millie,
Call me when you wake up! We have a big problem. Senator Adler proposed a bill a few months ago to morph some of the IP laws to account for magic. Most of it is Copyright stuff that basically says you can’t copy and reproduce works of art magically without violating a copyright. Pretty straight forward. The Patent part’s pretty much buried in there, I didn’t even know about it until today.
Mac Marston, the reporter who wanted to interview you about your appeal up to the Federal Circuit, just told me about it. He wants us to look through the bill and respond in the interview tomorrow.
The bill would make magic unpatentable subject matter.
The bill’s attached, the Patent part doesn’t even start till page 80. Read it and get into the office. We need to start planning. I’m thinking we start lobbying today with the interview. Turn this from a boring bill on IP issues nobody has ever heard of into a national scandal of Congress discriminating against magic and trying to hide it in plain sight. It’s going through the subcommittees now so we have a chance to gut it before it even makes it to the floor.
I want protests, outrage, people screaming discrimination in the streets of DC. I want a fucking rally!
I’m getting a PI to dig up dirt on Senator Adler. We’re going to destroy him and his bill.
Get ready for a war, kid.
I couldn’t even manage to call him a drama king in my mind. He was right. We were looking at a war and the other side had been prepping for months before springing a sneak attack.
My career, everything I had eaten, breathed and slept for the last two years cut off by politics? If Congress put into law that magic was patently unpatentable, there was nothing the courts could do about it under patent law. We could argue discrimination and try to get the law overturned, but that was a long shot that would take even longer, and not even close to my area.
Magic was so new to the world, so different, so other, that it would get rooted down by the first laws passed on it. And it wasn’t like patenting was a sexy issue. It wasn’t people fighting for the rights of sentient animals, or putting a god on trial for assault, or even trying to get the gods’ new churches filed as nonprofits.
It was patent law.
No, we had to stop this bill in its tracks. And to do that, we had to make this about discrimination and not patents.
I was going to need more coffee.
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