Bill Gates Seeking Patent To Make Shakespeare Less Boring

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are seeking a patent on making textbooks less boring by using a cellphone or other device to scan text on a page, parse its meaning, and automatically create suitable accompanying video or pictures to keep students engaged. From the patent application for Autogenerating Video From Text: 'A student is assigned a reading assignment. To make the assignment more interesting, the student may use his or her mobile phone to take a picture of a page of the textbook. The systems and methods described herein may then generate a synthesized image sequence of the action occurring in the text. Thus, rather than simply reading names and dates, the student may see soldiers running across a battlefield.' Furthermore, the patent explains, the experience may be tailored to a user's preferences: 'For example, in a video clip about a Shakespearean play, the preference data may be used to insert family members into the video clip instead of the typical characters.'"

Re:Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.arstechnica.com ./ has become so full of shit and its all thanks to its amazing editors. Job well done

Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[fuzzybunny]

Misleading headline aside, Shakespeare is hilarious.

Violence, sex, creative insults galore, betrayal, incest, murder, sword fights, pork sword fights, ghosts, and more invented words than you can shake a pork sword at.

It is awesome and even suggesting that the short attention span squad deserves being pandered to is borderline criminal.

Re:Headline

[Mikkeles]

Besides, this patent just describes storyboarding [wikipedia.org], but on a computer!.

Re:What problem

[Attila the Bun]

The problem is that people are being taught Shakespeare without seeing the plays. The books are just scripts - useful for studying the play, but they were never meant to stand on their own. Without the actors the lines are dry and uninteresting.

Even a video doesn't convey why Shakespeare is regarded as one of the greatest English writers. His plays were meant to be watched in a theatre, where actors can captivate the audience and convey their story. Good actors will make the story clear and accessible to anyone, as Shakespeare intended, in spite of the old-fashioned and sometimes-difficult language. Only then, once you've seen and understood the play can you start to study it in more detail.

The patent sounds technically dubious, but it's not even addressing the real problem.

Re:Headline

[king neckbeard]

No, the purpose of patents is to stimulate invention, or more specifically, to "promote the progress." The legal monopoly is the means by which the patent system tries to reach this goal. And no, there's no specific intention of a next invention, although that may be a benefit in some cases. If that were the case, we could just much more efficiently hand out research grants to promising researchers with promising ideas. We can do that already.