
The Fair Use of Ideas - joshuacc
http://davidbarnard.com/post/8653446531/the-fair-use-of-ideas
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bediger
This article exhibits an unhealthy hidden assumption: that ideas (or maybe
concepts) can be owned. That may be true legally, but it isn't true ethically
or practically.

Independent invention happens all the time, and basically upends the concept
of "idea as property". Wbo invented the computer? Babbage, Turing, Atanasoff
or Eckert and Mauchly? Who invented radio? Marcon, Lee de Forest? Who invented
the telegraph? Did Morse invent anything that Claude Chappe did not?

Since ideas can be developed independently (Knuth-Morris-Pratt string search,
anyone?) and since one inventor really can't tell if someone else "stole" the
idea or invented it independently (that is, there's no possession involved),
then "stealing" really isn't the proper concept to apply.

~~~
joshuacc
Your comments make a lot of sense for certain classes of ideas, like
inventions. However, it is less clear to me that they apply to other sorts of
"ideas as property," like musical compositions, novels, poetry, etc.

