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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

The complaint that "someone stole my idea" assumes that ideas are unique to the person who has them first. They're not - most ideas are a more or less obvious evolution of an existing product, and many people come up the same things completely independent of each other.

Most of the time the complaint is really "someone implemented the thing I wasn't ever going to get around to doing and now I'm jealous."

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And usually those people call themselves "idea guys" (yes they're usually male), and they're looking for a "tech guy" to implement it for them for free, in exchange the promise of a small cut of the profits.

I was at a tech get-together and a typical one of those guys approached me and asked "Are you a tech guy or an idea guy?" And I was like, "Well, I'm a tech guy, but I like to think that I'm capable of coming up with ideas, too." It only seems like a dichotomy to people who can't program, believe that coming up with ideas is hard, programming is easy, programmers can't think, and need "idea guys" to tell them what to do.

The idea exists outside of your knowledge of it. It is not something you own, therefore cannot be stolen from you. You can own a table, but the idea of a table, something flat with legs that stuff can be placed on, exists without you. This is an old idea, going back to Plato.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms

If we take the phrase my idea was stolen! literally, then yes, yours is the conclusion we would reach. But the sentiment behind the phrase is more like, the other player cheated by cribbing off your notes; they did not have to invest the labor/time/money you did, and that isn't fair.

This is meta.

It reminds of something I once read: things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Worse, they imply that an idea is a tangible thing, owned by someone. Some type of property, that can be stolen and thus deprive you of something.

Well, they kinda are, otherwise what is intellectual property?

> Well, they kinda are, otherwise what is intellectual property?

Intellectual property is a subset of the broader category of intangible personal property, and so does not require its subjects to be tangible things.

Further, the subjects of intellectual property are not generally ideas: e.g., copyright protects particular expressions (not the ideas expressed) while patent protects particular applications (not the ideas applied).

I was replying to:

> Some type of property, that can be stolen and thus deprive you of something.

> Further, the subjects of intellectual property are not generally ideas: e.g., copyright protects particular expressions (not the ideas expressed) while patent protects particular applications (not the ideas applied).

I disagree.

If someone write a novel and someone else write the same sort of novel, with the same kind of plot and characters, they are not stealing the expression (which would be the way that person write) but the idea. Plagiary is a well established offense AFAIK.

Intellectual property is permission to prevent other people from doing something.

In the case of trademarks, you are allowed to prevent people from using a particular name (in order to keep that name unique and meaningful).

In the case of patents, you are allowed to prevent people from "using your idea" (even if it's also their idea). Supposedly this encourages people to develop ideas to the point where they're actually useful (and patentable), but looking at history they don't actually help.

In the case of copyright, you are allowed to prevent people from duplicating or building on your ideas (but in theory not from doing the same thing independently). Similar to patents, this doesn't appear to provide the benefits it's meant to (but it isn't quite as clear).

In no case is an idea a piece of intellectual property. Instead, the property is the right to prevent certain actions. The two cases of (attempted) intellectual property theft that I've heard of are the lawsuits by SCO around the Unix copyrights, and some guy in Florida (I think) who sued the author of some open-source Java model railroad software (I think this had to do with patents rather than copyright).

> Intellectual property is permission to prevent other people from doing something.

Property -- not just intellectual property -- is the legal power to exclude others from some set of actions.

Physical property also has the saying "possession is nine tenths of the law". That is, the legal power to exclude others tends to be based on an underlying reality.

> Physical property also has the saying "possession is nine tenths of the law".

Which saying is (a) not accurate of physical property, and (b) insofar as it does relate to real legal principles applicable to physical property, those principles are also applicable to intangible personal property.

Really, its more about a presumption against proprietary rights -- as property is the right to exclude others, if ownership can't be proven, no one can be excluded, and whoever is taking an action which would be excludable by another's ownership is safe, even if they cannot prove that they are the owner who would have the right to exclude others.

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