> If someone breaks into my car and steals my iPod, that's theft. I, the original owner, no longer possess the item.
Theft covers more than just the taking of physical property. You can steal an idea, for example.
Theft covers more than just the taking of physical property. You can steal an idea, for example.
Once someone has made it possible for the idea to be shared -- even if they wrote it down and locked it in their safe -- then the information is already potentially accessible!
Breaking-in to someone's home to steal the paper you wrote your idea on is explicitly the theft, and getting the idea written on it is a side-effect.
first example:
> dishonestly pass off (another person‘s ideas) as one’s own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying
How so? I can't even really write about it without getting mired in semantics, but here goes...
Suppose, one icy winter, I see you scraping your car's windows with an inverted plastic coffee mug. I'm having a lot of trouble with my store-bought flat, shovel-shaped scraper. I copy your idea: I bring a plastic mug out to my car, and use that mug to scrape frost off my car's windows the next day.
Did I "steal" your idea? How did I do that? You still have use of your plastic coffee mug. What's missing?
And then there's the issue of independent invention which happens a lot more than "copying == theft" folks ever admit. I invented the round windsheild frost scraper in the mid-80s. Unfortunately, someone else did, too: I found a round scraper in a K-Mart once, with a patent number on it.
Did I steal his/her idea? On my mother's grave, I did not. I invented it independently.
Similarly, I invented the same propulsion system that Freeman Dyson did in the 60s for "Project Orion". My sister claims to have invented "curtain walls" in high school, a long time before she went to college for an architecture degree.
Describe how I can "steal" an idea.
How can you tell if I invented the circular ice scraper, or the folks who hold a patent on it invented it? If they invented it, why do I still scrape frost and ice off my car's windshield with a yellow plastic coffee mug, manufactured by "Tupperware"?