Comment by apitaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apitaru | Hacker News Reader

Many of us here have experienced our work getting cloned by others. While I totally get that 'everything is a remix', I still can't help but feel that kick in the gut every time this happens. I am always bothered by how much I care. It took me a while to reconcile this emotional-jerk. Here's how I see it now:

John Cleese has a wonderful talk about how each project consists for 'open' and 'close' modes [1]. In one sentence - open mode is playing around with ideas and stumbling upon a gem in the rough, while closed mode is the execution of polishing that gem to perfection.

Seen through this framework, I would claim that 'cloning' is the act of jumping in on someone else's open-mode work, and forking a new close-mode.

Why do we care when someone does this? I think that as the open-mode is a highly creative process, it is hard to not get emotionally attached to the rough-gems it produces. Some will describe it as nothing shy of birthing an idea. In that sense, the kick-in-the-gut that I feel is probably the sense of loss associated with someone 'snatching my new-born'.

I'm not suggesting that cloning is good or bad, but just trying to provide a reasonable explanation to why we feel pain when someone clones our work - even though we know it's OK.

[EDIT: there are situations where 'cloning' is in essence thievery. And that's not OK. Where to draw the line deserves its own thread.]

[1] John Cleese on creativity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg

I do not feel the kick in the gut when somebody imitates my work. I suspect the feeling is in large part due to how you are socialized.

This is pure speculation - but it is probably important to our social status that we are recognized for our contributions. If others can shamelessly take credit for all our brilliant ideas, they will increase in social status, while we seem not to contribute anything. Thus it makes sense that we would have a deeply seated, hardwired resentment for other people taking credit for our hard work.

Even if somebody copies you and then attributes the work to you, some of the credit for the idea still goes to that person rather than to you. Attributions are often overlooked by 'the public' and the social status often still goes to the person they got it from.

The power of this kick in the gut may lessen the more comfortable you are with your position, and how well esteemed you feel by the people around you. You may be less opposed to having your work copied if you feel, on a deep, emotional level, that you are still in general highly respected for your contributions even if you 'lose' a few to other people copying them and taking credit.

Which reminds me of this comic by Jessica Hagy: http://thisisindexed.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/card2752...

You make a valid point but I think other factors are at play in my case.

For starters, the comic you've linked to suggests that I don't come up with many new ideas, but a glance at my HN profile might reveal otherwise.

I think it has more to do with how long I spend in open-mode. I suspect longer than others. I like to marinate on my ideas. I try to give myself a lot of time to solve a problem. The result is a certain level of depth that I might feel extra ownership over. This is a side-effect and an unintentional one at that.

I'm now working hard on optimizing my work-flow to counter this issue. Some of it has to do with releasing things sooner than later (thus feeling less invested in them at that point).

This is incredibly insightful. I think you've probably identified exactly the main reason this bothers people so much.

Speaking of emotional-jerks, I cannot help but get extremely upset every time I hear how "innovative" angry birds is compared to crush the castle. Replacing a ball with a bird and shortening the launch mechanics do not to me represent the difference between millions of dollars and thousands of dollars.

It drives me crazy that our society allocates millions of dollars of resources in terms of profits for something like this. This is not genius. This is not innovation. It's polish and refinement on an ultimately inconsequential entertainment product. I understand completely why it makes money. But I still cannot help but be upset that things like this do earn obscene amounts of income.

Unfortunately, the markets reward only what people buy, not innovation, not what might change society permanently, nor good intentions. Sometimes it just rewards replacing art assets with birds and pigs.

Polish and execution are everything. It's the reason Apple's MacBooks sell for much higher prices (and much higher profit margins) than similarly-specced (but lower build quality) PC laptops. It's the reason people are on waiting lists to buy Nest thermostats when the same people didn't give a second thought to thermostats before.

Rovio took a fun idea and made it much more accessible and marketable to people. That's not an easy job, and the market rewarded them appropriately.

The engineering that goes into macbooks or nest is not comparable to the angry birds art assets or their launching tweak. That also ignores the fact that the former are physical products that also require an entire ongoing, expensive and complex manufacturing process.

The casual game market, at this point, is more about luck than anything else. These companies produce game after game, many with an equal amount of polish to angry birds, hoping that one lottery winning recipe. Draw Something is another good example, minus the polish. Zynga's entire company is based on this understanding. Their strategy is to wait until they observe a success by another developer, then produce their own more polished version of that product. Thus they get all of the profit and none of the risk or cost of experimentation.

The market is not "rewarding" anything. It doesn't have ethics, it doesn't recognize innovation, it doesn't recognize hard work nor difficulty of implementation. The allocation of profits in the casual games market is as fickle, nonsensical, and random as musical pop stars. The music industry has learned how to "manufacture" pop stars and the casual games industry is now starting learn to do the same in their market.

I also feel that pop stars have unwarranted sums of money allocated to them. Obviously I am in the minority in this feeling however, and that is ok.

You may be in the minority but you're not alone!

I think you sum it up perfectly in your third paragraph. The emotional jerks we get in these examples are based on that false assumption that the market "rewards" anything. The market just is, and it's a fickle beast as you eloquently describe.

The difference between angry birds and crush the castle may very well be just the artistic assets, but those differences matter immensely to the market. And today's markets seem to reward a few projects much more heavily than others once they've reached a critical point.

I respect folks that take an existing idea and evolve it. But for some reason the App Store in particular tends to attract a certain type of developer whose entire approach involves cloning other successful apps in an attempt to make a buck or two.

I have had my iPad app cloned (essentially screen-for-screen) and it definitely felt like a kick in the gut when I found out. The only consolation is that it's pretty obvious that nobody is downloading his clone and the developer most likely wasted his time that could have been better spent doing something original.

I'm curious why you wouldn't feel flattered that your creation was noticed and worth copying? I would.

Do you believe ideas can be owned?

> I'm curious why you wouldn't feel flattered that your creation was noticed and worth copying?

Because I'm human, I guess. Sometimes I'm flattered and sometimes I'm not. It has a lot to do with the nature of project, how it has been copied, who copied it, why they did it.

Understanding this, I'm now trying hard to position myself in situations where I'll be flattered when it happens and disappointed when it doesn't.

> Do you believe ideas can be owned?

I do not, hence the entire premise of my parent post.

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