We live in the age of silent espionage, where large money hoarding monopolies control information and silently monitor trends. That information is also used to crush competition at the ground level. Even your notepad application talks to the Internet... Your social media posts get consumed by crawlers, that report your ideas back to companies with large teams of devs that could easily spin up a clone of your idea 10 times faster than you could.
It's at the point where writing thoughts in a notepad (on paper) will be the only way to keep them somewhat secure... Then of course, you need to be able to fully develop your ideas totally offline, until you're ready to launch... But then even after go live, you'll need to rely on those same systems that work to reverse engineer your best ideas, or to sell them in secret to your competition... We're doomed perhaps... As an independent software maker, you compete instantly with companies that run powerful espionage platforms, and that have money and human resources that can easily crush you, along with legal teams that can ensure you spend the rest of your life in a courthouse battling for ownership of your original brilliant ideas...
Maybe it's time to just return to entrepreneurship that doesn't involve software development, or jurnalism, or anything online for that matter... Even our calculator app snitches over the Internet on us now, and it's far too late for an aging and very non-technical Congress to reign this shady brand of innovation espionage back into anything protective of our rights.