If was the best of times, it was the worst of times. More to the point, it was the time I conceived Famous First Words, the rare LabKitty App that actually made it as far as prototyping (after I purchased an ADP license and Erica Sandun's excellent iPhone Developer's Cookbook. Oh, and a 32-bit Intel MacBook, which is required to run the iPhone SDK. Which Apple then promptly stopped supporting. Cats above, how many laptops do I have to buy from you rat bastards? Is five not enough? No, come back! I'm sorry. I still love you Apple. I'll tell the girls at the office I walked into a door) before getting smothered in its crib.
The idea of FFW is as simple as it was doomed. Comb through a collection of great works of literature and have the app show the opening line of one chosen at random. For example: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." (That's from Pride and Prejudice, ya savages.) Or: "In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit." (The Hobbit) Or: "See the child." (Blood Meridian) Display the text on a tastefully accented background, perhaps surrounded by bunting or Hoeffler symbols, and sell the thing for $0.99 on the app store. Boom! Instant millionaire.
Then the wheels came off.
As I was saying, I got as far as prototyping FFW and then I discovered a few things. First, I discovered the search function on the app store is bad. Astonishingly bad. Horrifically bad. Litigiously bad. How is it possible for a billion dollar computer company to be incapable of writing a proper search function? How gorram hard can it be? What, are you hippies still coding in Pascal and RezEdit? (No, come back! I'm sorry. I still love you Apple. I'll tell the doctor I fell down the stairs again.)
I know this as surely as I know FFW would have been a best seller, because after doing my due diligence and searching for something like it on the app store literally for a week using every sensible permutation of keywords I could muster and coming up empty, it seemed a reasonable conclusion that nobody had yet snagged the idea. Ergo prototype. Weeks later, after accidentally sitting on my keyboard and entering a random character string into the iTunes search box, out pops Great First Lines, an app that picks a great work of literature at random and, well, you know the rest. GFL had won awards and sold a bazillion copies, the developers probably since retired to a private island where scantily clad hotties are feeding them peeled grapes on the beach as we speak.
Which brings us to the second lesson: Unless you have a million dollar marketing team to advertise your app, replete with scented glossies that fall out of magazines at the doctor's office and animatronic billboards besmirching the pristine wilderness cut by our interstate highways and perhaps even a blimp or two, the fruit of your labors will never see the light of day. If you think your app is going to get found simply by people looking for it, if you think you will rise to the top of the iPile on sheer talent and chutzpa, I got two words for you: fart noise. At last count there were 1,437 apps on the app store that make fart noises -- every last one of them submitted to and approved by Apple -- and rest assured the app store search results will show a potential customer every last one of them before it ever finds you, no matter what search phrase they type. Because, you know, THEY'RE SO FUNNY. It's official: Apple has become a company run by and for teenage boys.
Still, I was not quite ready to give up.
There is an old academic's saw which goes: If somebody asks you a question you can't answer, pretend they asked a different question. And so, with a prototype of Famous First Words in hand, it was a short instruction jump to create Famous Last Words (which I keep abbreviating as "FML" for some Freudian reason), the point being it presents the last line of a famous work of literature instead of the first. So, for example, if you selected The Hobbit, you would see:
"Thank goodness! said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar."
Or, Neuromancer:
"He never saw Molly again."
Or, The C Programming Language:
"By using bfree, a user can add a static or external array to the free list at any time."
It seemed salvation was at hand. But then, I blinked.
Yes, there was an issue of spoilers. If you didn't know Bilbo makes it back from the Lonely Mountain or the user finds a way to add a static or external array to the free list at any time, then giving away the last line may well ruin the reading experience. I suppose you know that going in, although there is nothing preventing random strangers from rick rolling you on the subway. (Given my experience of public transportation, if this is the worst that happens to you it is a good ride indeed. But I digress.) Yet, while this was cause for concern, it was not the final nail in the FML coffin.
The final nail was intellectual property law.
The question naturally arose as to what works I could and could not use. Is any published work fair game or no? Is one sentence fair game or no? When is a copyright applicable? When does a copyright expire? When the work is out of print? When the author is dead? Are the rules different for print versus electronic media? Do the rules change for international sales?
Pause here with me for a moment. Imagine listing all of humanity's works in order of increasing complexity. We begin with the cuneiform writings of Mesopotamia, then come works of the great Greek philosophers and Roman orators, after which the output of the Renaissance -- of the Charlemagnean first, then the Italian and the Northern -- subsequently moving to the Scientific Revolution, bringing with it calculus then expanding into spheres of ever increasing mathematical incomprehensibility, culminating with quantum physics in the 20th century accompanied by Lebesgue integration and stochastic differential equations and renormalizable gauge theory...
All that would be piled up at the left end of our graph, a mere speck at the "not complicated" end. Because far to the right, located approximately in the constellation Betelgeuse, dwarfing all that came before, is intellectual property law.
I tried to understand it. I really did. But as far as I can tell, the current state of intellectual property law is this: iIlegal is anything a lawyer says it is.
Think I'm exaggerating? Consider an anecdote. As you may know, LabKitty has a little Zazzle store (look to your right). I once made a football-y sweatshirt design and had the temerity to mention "Penn State" in the product blurb. Not in the design itself, not even in the search keywords for the item. Simply an off-handed quip in a larger description. Two words. Within hours, an attorney representing the Reagents of the University of Pennsylvania had contacted Zazzle and threatened legal action if they did not immediately remove the offending item. I had the bad form of mentioning the Penn State brand without greasing the Penn State palm. Zazzle rolled over faster than an Italian cruise ship. The innocent sweatshirt design I sweated literally hours to create was taken out and machine gunned into some Internet 404 grave like a mangy dog.
Thus the final lesson: intellectual property law has nothing to do with protecting intellectual property and everything to do with greed. It's nothing more than a C&D paper mill designed to keep every hopeful startup face down in the mud once you get yours. A "kick me" sign hung on the rule of law. Gimme, gimme, gimme.
The only honest thing to ever come out of a patent office was Special Relativity.
So, if you would like to develop FML you have my blessing, but my blessing may not be the issue. I suspect the folks at GFL will be the first ones to come knocking, followed closely by the estates of every author from E.L. James to Virgil. Indeed, I don't know how the developers of Great FIrst Lines skirted this issue. I can only assume for every programmer they employ, they employ a dozen lawyers, or a dozen rabid junkyard badgers, or a dozen psychotic drifters with CC permits. Maybe they have a few congressmen on the payroll like every other corporation. Who knows. All I know is I have no patience for such shenanigans, for such shenanigans are an affront to common sense. Once common sense is affronted, LabKitty takes the mouse and goes home.
And remember, by the time you get a court date Apple will have stopped supporting your hardware.
Misguided angel, love you 'till I'm dead.
DISCLAIMER: The Hobbit copyright (c) 1937 George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Blood Meridian copyright (c) 1985 Cormac McCarthy. Neuromancer copyright (c) 1984 William Gibson. The C Programming Language copyright (c) 1984 Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. Misguided Angel copyright (c) 1988 BMG Music. Use of excerpts from these works here is claimed as fair use because these appear in an article reviewing the related material and does not in a reasonable person's mind constitute an infringement of the owner's rights to receive compensation for the copyrighted work. Excerpt from A Tale of Two Cities is in the public domain. MacBook, iPhone, and iTunes are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. By the time you read this, nouns, verbs, adjectives, personal pronouns, ones and zeros, umlauts, vowels, and the schwa will probably be property of Microsoft, Inc.
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