The Dangerous Trend Of Thinking That Ideas Can Be Owned, Sold Or Stolen | Hacker News Reader

The Dangerous Trend Of Thinking That Ideas Can Be Owned, Sold Or Stolen

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71 pointsmakimaki22 comments

I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by. It's partly why I hated doing projects for friends as an undergrad. They'd think, I have this amazing idea that's going to become huge on the internet and really just need a trained monkey to translate idea into a functioning web property. The problem is that they'd have an idea like, "create a website where bands could upload music and users could listen for free and bands would get a cut of the ad revenue!" and then everything beyond that was my problem. Even something as simple as a name couldn't be chosen because they couldn't implement even simple things. Better yet were the people who had just "stolen" an already implemented idea (say, eBay) describe it and then at the end casually say, "kinda like eBay" as if that wasn't something I knew existed. Then when I ask, well, how should the reputation system be implemented (positive only, wait a week after each has entered their feedback to display, require some feedback or the user themselves gets neg feedback as a non-feedback provider, auto-extend auctions so that there's at least a minute after the final bid before it closes to prevent sniping. . .) they'd be clueless. Those were my problems. They had an idea!

However, sometimes people do what I would consider stealing of ideas. For example, you and a friend start creating mockups and going through the interactions and then he decides to take that and go his own way. Then again, I guess the author would probably classify that as design and implementation rather than idea.

Truly, what is patentable should be very small. Discoveries, ideas and business models are not the implementation of an invention. Likewise, it must be an implementation. For example (since the History channel always seems to have stuff about this), if you come up with a way that a gun pushes the next bullet into the chamber and pulls back the hammer, fine. If you say, I want to patent a gun that automatically gets the gun ready for the next bullet, not fine. In the first, you've done a specific thing - there might be more than one way to do it and you've developed a specific fashion. In the second, you're just saying that it could be done through some method you haven't implemented anything.

I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by.

I find this strongly depends. I agree with the article, but this sentence seems to generalize it a bit too much. As a developer, I'm bottlenecked by ideas, not by coding. And I don't mean "make a site kinda like eBay" ideas, but ideas like:

"How do I optimally distribute quality across a video frame to best approximate the human visual system?"

"How do I measure video quality in a manner that takes into account the human brain's dislike for certain types of artifacts?"

"How do I reorder the operations in this 2D frequency transform to avoid having to transpose the data?"

The answers to these are certainly "ideas"--but they're ideas that are far harder to come up with than their implementations. While "make a site like eBay" takes a few minutes to come up with and a few months of development to implement, something like the above might take an hour or even as little as 15 minutes to implement, but the ideas are few and far between.

Here's the anecdote for the third of the above:

Developer1: I found a way to make this frequency transform a whole lot faster, but I'm not allowed to say yet because my university won't let me.

Developer2: Wait, that can be done faster? I didn't think it could be done much faster. If it can, it must mean there's a faster way to...

30 minutes pass

Developer2: Here's a patch, it makes the transform 60% faster.

No speed advancement had been made in that extremely important and often-called function for over 6 months--and it took only about 30 minutes to make it that much better merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done better.

Boyer-Moore string searching is a good example of a simple but non-obvious "idea" (search backwards; it's much faster).

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-searc...

Boyer-Moore is far from non-obvious. I remember having the same basic idea when I was a kid, when I was programming on the C64 and before I had access to the internet or decent programming books. The details - e.g. jump distances based on whether and where the characters occur in the search string etc. - come up in trying to create a working implementation.

I tend to think that ideas are a dime a dozen, and actually doing it is what makes the difference - Boyer-Moore is one of the few counter-examples. But if you also had the idea... could it be that you're unusually smart?

The details of Boyer-Moore seem obvious to me, in that you bump into them in trying to get it working, even if you don't foresee them. They are like workshop improvements. Did you manage to implement a version of it, as a kid? Or is this another instance of showing that actually doing it is what counts?

Our "idea" legal structure (patents, copyrights, etc) is not about ideas at all. Its about commerce. All that matters is implementation in a manner that increases money exchange. Everything is optimized around that, or is supposed to be.

An idea itself is of little value. If it were, the really hard stuff, like math itself, would be patentable.

If you had implemented a simple string search, and then someone told you that it was usually possible to do a string search without examining all the characters of the string, you'd probably come up with some Boyer-Moore variant. Nevertheless it took decades for people to come up with it. It's one of those cases where the basic idea is the really hard part.

Binary search, among the very basic algorithms, is toward the other extreme. An incorrect version of the algorithm was published something like 20 years before a bug-free version was published.

Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) is an excellent hard science fiction novel, in which merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done better figures prominently.

Similar to your gun example, the first seven claims of Morse's telegraph patent were upheld, because they claimed his specific invention; but the eighth was struck out, because it tried to claim the general idea of transmitting information by wires.

Not all ideas are easy to come by. For example, the idea of the Cathedral and the Bazaar and discovery of Linus's law is far from easy to come by. Only great thinkers are capable of generating such ideas.

The fact that Eric Raymond generated both of those ideas refutes your assertion.

Absolutely agree with the points of this article.

Love this quote: Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to "own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.

The same concept applies to all other forms of "Intellectual Propery" - which, in my opinion, is why Intellectual Property is a contradiction in terms. There is no "property" in the intellectual realms, only a temporary exclusive licence in some cases (like some artistic creations and patentable inventions). To call it "property" is a misnomer with terrible consequences.

The result of this dangerous trend that the RIAA/MPAA and other content publishers have been pushing is that people now feel that because they've created something they have some ownership rights over it, and they feel hurt when someone "steals" it from them.

Actually, one of the greatest gifts of the universe is the fact that ideas are free and intangible, that they can spread with no resource cost, rapidly, until they are supplanted by better ideas. We should welcome this fantastic circumstance and make use of it instead of trying to arbitrarily make it look like physical property.

> We should welcome this fantastic circumstance and make use of it instead of trying to arbitrarily make it look like physical property.

Well... yes and no. I absolutely love free software, and if I were really wealthy, would work on nothing else. However, the idea behind creating property where none really exists is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Introducing_an_excl...

With the possibility being that, without any of the mechanisms mentioned, "intellectual property" kinds of things might be underprovisioned. I.e., why sink 5 years of research into a new widget design if you can't even recoup those research costs because someone else just copies your design.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, it's a big, hairy, complex discussion that revolves around various compromises, and in terms of policy, in places like the US, it probably leans too far in favor of IP producers, or at least those with deep pockets.

I would go even further.

IP should be done away with legally wherever possible. When in doubt eliminate it. Where it is absolutely necessary, when things just don't get done & no positive equilibrium forms, introduce it. Not as a 'right' any more then a government contract is a right. Just a rule of the game that allows medicine to be developed or technology to improve.

I can't possibly see how disappearing music IP would hurt society in aggregate. I dare say music would still be made. The dynamic of the industry would be completely different. Maybe there would be a 10% loss of revenue industry wide. maybe 25% or 50% or even 90%. That still probably leaves a bigger industry then sculpting or comic theatre. Music is very popular. It will not disappear tomorrow.

Even in medicine I think it is possible there would be some gains. After all, it's a huge market & will remain so. I'm not sure that public funding for research wouldn't be just as good as private patent-chasing funding it would need to replace. There is a lot of inefficiency in the system now anyway.

New antibiotics (probably the most important single class of medicine) are not profitable to develop. A patient take 1 course & then goes home. If you price them high, then doctors will prescribe a different antibiotic. But a new antibiotic will save lives as it will probably work in some end cases where existing ones don't. It's also a bit of insurance against future resistant strains. But the economy for developing antidepressants, cosmetics or some other long term treatment drugs with potentially fewer cheap substitutes is much stronger.

This is really pushing it. I don't know to analyse all the economic outcomes. But I know I see no strong moral reason for IP laws other then those that generate the most well being for society.

*In reality transitioning would be hugely difficult. I'm not saying throw it out & start from scratch. I'm saying reconsider.

For example in academia, being "scooped" is a very often discussed and a very real threat. In the research community, hard-working people that are excellent at execution are a dime a dozen, and ideas that have not been done before are a really scarce resource. In the industry it might be less obvious, but it's still quite possible for a small company with good ideas AND good execution to be killed by a large competitor that decides to reimplement their product, but with 200 engineers.

The fear of being scooped is more a function of the "pubish or perish" model and the reward model than anything else. Half the times someone gets beaten to a publication, it's because they were not the only ones with the idea in the first place. The most interesting scientific problems people are trying to work on are not unique anyway. The effort should be on changing the reward model, rather than artificially create problems like scooping.

> compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm ... eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base

A bit alarmist, as patents are time-limited (20 years), and much of our software technology is older than that. For example, everything in the Dragon compiler book (1986). Of course, that wasn't true when Abrash wrote the above (1996).

I'm not a programmer by any means. I am involved with writing though, and often I have to draw on other people's work to support an assertion I'm making. I just use some quotation marks "" and cite the author and page number at the end of the sentence (author #).

I know it isn't a one to one example, but I wonder why it is acceptable to quote and cite with no need for permission in literature, but when it comes to code people "own" their ideas?

With regard to copyright, it's usually a question of quantity. Up to 10 lines of code is often regarded irrelevant for copyright purposes. Of course, it's not as simple as that: 10 lines in how concise a language, etc. But it's not a big problem most of the time, in the same way literary or other human-language text is copyrighted but it's still acceptable to quote and cite.

But ideas themselves don't fall under copyright; unfortunately, some countries allow the patenting of software algorithms, which do cover the idea to some extent.

It's an interesting question how much code you can copy under the fair use doctrine. I don't think I've ever seen it tested in court.

Standing on the shoulders of giants. And cashing out.

I think of ideas and their implementation(s) as complexity classes. Your situation is one of the following:

EE: easy idea, easy implementation (Plenty Of Fish)

HE: hard idea, easy implementation (arithmetic coding)

EH: easy idea, hard implementation (eBay)

HH: hard idea, hard implementation (Powerset)

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