Let People Steal Your IdeasI know. This is a controversial statement. Even a bit radical. Why would anyone want to let anyone steal their ideas? Doesn’t protecting ideas incentivize people to produce more good ideas? Well, yes. But that’s not the full story.
First off, let’s not pretend that stealing ideas is a new thing. It happens all the time and you’re OK with it. I know you’re OK with it because you yourself steal ideas all the time. How many times have you recited someone else’s joke word for word to get a laugh? How many times have you repeated a neat idea that you read in a book or on a website somewhere to sound smart in front of people you respect? It’s time to admit to yourself that you steal ideas from people all the time. And people are stealing your ideas all the time too. It’s OK though. It’s what people do. As long as there’s different classes of people in this world, it’s never going to go away.
It’s when corporations came along and started copyrighting people’s ideas and making copies of them to sell books and CDs that the whole notion of stealing ideas took on criminal connotations.
And that wasn’t such a bad thing either. You had to protect your music because the record label that paid you needed assurances that all of those copies of your intellectual property that they printed up could remain a unique enough commodity to make a decent return on investment for everyone. If it didn’t, nobody got paid.
But that world is disappearing. We’re going back to how things used to be. You can’t protect your ideas. As soon as you get them out there, the public owns them. The Web is the marketplace on steroids.
Let people steal your ideas because they’re going to steal them anyway. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Why fight a force a billion times more powerful than you when you could join it and take advantage of it? You just need to educate yourself on how the new game is played.
If you’re paranoid about people downloading your music, adapting your song lyrics or ripping words directly from your blog, your mind is still stuck in the 20th century. Instead, you should be flattered when people steal your ideas. Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of other musicians and millions of websites competing for people’s time and attention.
When somebody steals your idea, it means that they think it’s good enough to devote their time and attention to. That’s a pretty big deal in today’s world. You should pray to God that your track gets downloaded and passed on. That’s free marketing.
The Internet has irreversibly changed the nature of media and marketing. You can’t really put a wall around your content anymore. What you can do is make yourself so unique that it’s hard to be you. People can’t make copies of that because it’s intangible. They can’t copy you, the live act, for example. If people do try to copy you, others will be pretty good at detecting the real from the fake. How easy is it to tell the difference on Twitter between the people who are there to just promote and those who are there to contribute real value? Human beings are good at detecting bullshit. Don’t worry too much about impostors.
Your personal brand protects you from them. So work on developing your personal appeal by creating unique ideas and hope that people steal them.
October 13th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Whoever wrote that article has made a great point
October 27th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Very good point. I haven’t thought about it that way before. Thanks for making me feel a little refreshment instead of paranoia.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Sometimes it just requires looking at something a tad bit different to realize that everything is ok…ideas are in the air. They’re meant to be stolen.