
The Dangerous Trend Of Thinking That Ideas Can Be Owned, Sold Or Stolen  - makimaki
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090107/0023103308.shtml
======
mdasen
I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're
special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by. It's partly why
I hated doing projects for friends as an undergrad. They'd think, I have this
amazing idea that's going to become huge on the internet and really just need
a trained monkey to translate idea into a functioning web property. The
problem is that they'd have an idea like, "create a website where bands could
upload music and users could listen for free and bands would get a cut of the
ad revenue!" and then everything beyond that was my problem. Even something as
simple as a name couldn't be chosen because they couldn't implement even
simple things. Better yet were the people who had just "stolen" an already
implemented idea (say, eBay) describe it and then at the end casually say,
"kinda like eBay" as if that wasn't something I knew existed. Then when I ask,
well, how should the reputation system be implemented (positive only, wait a
week after each has entered their feedback to display, require some feedback
or the user themselves gets neg feedback as a non-feedback provider, auto-
extend auctions so that there's at least a minute after the final bid before
it closes to prevent sniping. . .) they'd be clueless. Those were my problems.
They had an idea!

However, sometimes people do what I would consider stealing of ideas. For
example, you and a friend start creating mockups and going through the
interactions and then he decides to take that and go his own way. Then again,
I guess the author would probably classify that as design and implementation
rather than idea.

Truly, what is patentable should be very small. Discoveries, ideas and
business models are not the implementation of an invention. Likewise, it must
be an implementation. For example (since the History channel always seems to
have stuff about this), if you come up with a way that a gun pushes the next
bullet into the chamber and pulls back the hammer, fine. If you say, I want to
patent a gun that automatically gets the gun ready for the next bullet, not
fine. In the first, you've done a specific thing - there might be more than
one way to do it and you've developed a specific fashion. In the second,
you're just saying that it could be done through some method you haven't
implemented anything.

~~~
DarkShikari
_I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're
special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by._

I find this strongly depends. I agree with the article, but this sentence
seems to generalize it a bit too much. As a developer, I'm bottlenecked by
ideas, not by coding. And I don't mean "make a site kinda like eBay" ideas,
but ideas like:

"How do I optimally distribute quality across a video frame to best
approximate the human visual system?"

"How do I measure video quality in a manner that takes into account the human
brain's dislike for certain types of artifacts?"

"How do I reorder the operations in this 2D frequency transform to avoid
having to transpose the data?"

The answers to these are certainly "ideas"--but they're ideas that are far
harder to come up with than their implementations. While "make a site like
eBay" takes a few minutes to come up with and a few months of development to
implement, something like the above might take an hour or even as little as 15
minutes to implement, but the ideas are few and far between.

Here's the anecdote for the third of the above:

Developer1: I found a way to make this frequency transform a whole lot faster,
but I'm not allowed to say yet because my university won't let me.

Developer2: Wait, that can be done faster? I didn't think it could be done
much faster. If it can, it must mean there's a faster way to...

 _30 minutes pass_

Developer2: Here's a patch, it makes the transform 60% faster.

No speed advancement had been made in that extremely important and often-
called function for over 6 months--and it took only about 30 minutes to make
it that much better _merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done
better_.

~~~
11ren
Boyer-Moore string searching is a good example of a simple but non-obvious
"idea" (search backwards; it's much faster).

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-
searc...](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-searching/)

~~~
barrkel
Boyer-Moore is far from non-obvious. I remember having the same basic idea
when I was a kid, when I was programming on the C64 and before I had access to
the internet or decent programming books. The details - e.g. jump distances
based on whether and where the characters occur in the search string etc. -
come up in trying to create a working implementation.

~~~
11ren
I tend to think that ideas are a dime a dozen, and actually doing it is what
makes the difference - Boyer-Moore is one of the few counter-examples. But if
you also had the idea... could it be that you're unusually smart?

The details of Boyer-Moore seem obvious to me, in that you bump into them in
trying to get it working, even if you don't foresee them. They are like
workshop improvements. Did you manage to implement a version of it, as a kid?
Or is this another instance of showing that actually doing it is what counts?

~~~
jhancock
Our "idea" legal structure (patents, copyrights, etc) is not about ideas at
all. Its about commerce. All that matters is implementation in a manner that
increases money exchange. Everything is optimized around that, or is supposed
to be.

An idea itself is of little value. If it were, the really hard stuff, like
math itself, would be patentable.

------
swombat
Absolutely agree with the points of this article.

Love this quote: _Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to
"own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and
appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers,
algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them
in a position to have their brainstorm._

The same concept applies to all other forms of "Intellectual Propery" - which,
in my opinion, is why Intellectual Property is a contradiction in terms. There
is no "property" in the intellectual realms, only a temporary exclusive
licence in some cases (like some artistic creations and patentable
inventions). To call it "property" is a misnomer with terrible consequences.

The result of this dangerous trend that the RIAA/MPAA and other content
publishers have been pushing is that people now feel that because they've
created something they have some ownership rights over it, and they feel hurt
when someone "steals" it from them.

Actually, one of the greatest gifts of the universe is the fact that ideas are
free and intangible, that they can spread with no resource cost, rapidly,
until they are supplanted by better ideas. We should welcome this fantastic
circumstance and make use of it instead of trying to arbitrarily make it look
like physical property.

~~~
netcan
I would go even further.

IP should be done away with legally wherever possible. When in doubt eliminate
it. Where it is absolutely necessary, when things just don't get done & no
positive equilibrium forms, introduce it. Not as a 'right' any more then a
government contract is a right. Just a rule of the game that allows medicine
to be developed or technology to improve.

I can't possibly see how disappearing music IP would hurt society in
aggregate. I dare say music would still be made. The dynamic of the industry
would be completely different. Maybe there would be a 10% loss of revenue
industry wide. maybe 25% or 50% or even 90%. That still probably leaves a
bigger industry then sculpting or comic theatre. Music is very popular. It
will not disappear tomorrow.

Even in medicine I think it is possible there would be some gains. After all,
it's a huge market & will remain so. I'm not sure that public funding for
research wouldn't be just as good as private patent-chasing funding it would
need to replace. There is a lot of inefficiency in the system now anyway.

New antibiotics (probably the most important single class of medicine) are not
profitable to develop. A patient take 1 course & then goes home. If you price
them high, then doctors will prescribe a different antibiotic. But a new
antibiotic will save lives as it will probably work in some end cases where
existing ones don't. It's also a bit of insurance against future resistant
strains. But the economy for developing antidepressants, cosmetics or some
other long term treatment drugs with potentially fewer cheap substitutes is
much stronger.

This is really pushing it. I don't know to analyse all the economic outcomes.
But I know I see no strong moral reason for IP laws other then those that
generate the most well being for society.

*In reality transitioning would be hugely difficult. I'm not saying throw it out & start from scratch. I'm saying reconsider.

------
miloshh
For example in academia, being "scooped" is a very often discussed and a very
real threat. In the research community, hard-working people that are excellent
at execution are a dime a dozen, and ideas that have not been done before are
a really scarce resource. In the industry it might be less obvious, but it's
still quite possible for a small company with good ideas AND good execution to
be killed by a large competitor that decides to reimplement their product, but
with 200 engineers.

~~~
bbgm
The fear of being scooped is more a function of the "pubish or perish" model
and the reward model than anything else. Half the times someone gets beaten to
a publication, it's because they were not the only ones with the idea in the
first place. The most interesting scientific problems people are trying to
work on are not unique anyway. The effort should be on changing the reward
model, rather than artificially create problems like scooping.

------
11ren
> compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms,
> programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a
> position to have their brainstorm ... eventually everyone will own parts of
> our communal knowledge base

A bit alarmist, as patents are time-limited (20 years), and much of our
software technology is older than that. For example, _everything_ in the
Dragon compiler book (1986). Of course, that wasn't true when Abrash wrote the
above (1996).

------
Silentio
I'm not a programmer by any means. I am involved with writing though, and
often I have to draw on other people's work to support an assertion I'm
making. I just use some quotation marks "" and cite the author and page number
at the end of the sentence (author #).

I know it isn't a one to one example, but I wonder why it is acceptable to
quote and cite with no need for permission in literature, but when it comes to
code people "own" their ideas?

~~~
pmjordan
With regard to copyright, it's usually a question of quantity. Up to 10 lines
of code is often regarded irrelevant for copyright purposes. Of course, it's
not as simple as that: 10 lines in how concise a language, etc. But it's not a
big problem most of the time, in the same way literary or other human-language
text is copyrighted but it's still acceptable to quote and cite.

But ideas themselves don't fall under copyright; unfortunately, some countries
allow the patenting of software algorithms, which do cover the idea to some
extent.

------
geirfreysson
Standing on the shoulders of giants. And cashing out.

------
rw
I think of ideas and their implementation(s) as complexity classes. Your
situation is one of the following:

EE: easy idea, easy implementation (Plenty Of Fish)

HE: hard idea, easy implementation (arithmetic coding)

EH: easy idea, hard implementation (eBay)

HH: hard idea, hard implementation (Powerset)

