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So someone "stole" your idea

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Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#41

Post by cheez »

sergiotapia wrote: post #13

Or there are cases when ideas are actually stolen. :P My brother and I created a very popular website a couple of years ago called Oracle of Legends. It was a League of Legends fansite with a LOT of features that are now copied elsewhere. https://web.archive.org/web/20120509003942/http://www.oracle... Loking.net didn't have the skin viewer it now has. They saw our skin viewer (granted it wasn't "ours") and built one…

There is only one problem when it comes to competition: can you make money without competition?

If you have not figured out how you are going to do this, then moneyed competitors will beat you. If you have figured it out, then my experience shows that you will continue to make money, even if the competition matches you feature-for-feature.

Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#42

Post by beachstartup »

ivanca wrote: post #29
sergiotapia wrote: post #13

Or there are cases when ideas are actually stolen. :P My brother and I created a very popular website a couple of years ago called Oracle of Legends. It was a League of Legends fansite with a LOT of features that are now copied elsewhere. https://web.archive.org/web/20120509003942/http://www.oracle... Loking.net didn't have the skin viewer it now has. They saw our skin viewer (granted it wasn't "ours") and built one…

We should probably talk, contact me at ivanca[at]gmail, I'm a Colombian developer living in the bay area (California) who is also passionate about videogames.

obfuscating your email is useless. spam harvesters know all the common methods. just put your email in your profile if you don't want it showing up in threads.

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

also, security through obscurity is also a flawed concept to begin with. your obfuscation efforts do absolutely zilch compared to google's gmail team and their spam detection techniques.

Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#44

Post by grannyg00se »

taude wrote: post #36

Counter point (thought not arguing against what the actual article content contained, which "was we tried that idea years ago, but failed"). I've been contacted by investors before to look at business plans/technology. They didn't like the founders/team, or thought the idea was really good, but missing a couple things, or they had a different direction they'd run it in. So idea theft does happen. Those with money, po…

"They didn't like the founders/team, or thought the idea was really good, but missing a couple things, or they had a different direction they'd run it in. So idea theft does happen. "

My two cents:

You can't steal what isn't owned. If you think my idea is really good and then you act on it, you haven't stolen anything from me. I never owned that idea because ideas can't be owned. What if someone else three thousand miles away has the same idea? Do we both own it? Did you steal it from both of us?

On the other hand if, in your scenario, there was an established business plan, and other proprietary details that were taken, that's theft.

I guess it comes down to the details.

Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#45

Post by jacquesm »

michalu wrote: post #15

Years ago I heard so many people say they had an idea for Youtube before Youtube ... and some of these people can't even code. It's my vice that I'm not proud of, but whenever I heard it I felt like slapping that person.

I can do better than that, so feel free to slap me :) My partner Michael had a working implementation for a youtube like service and we both agreed it would be better to concentrate on our 'live' business because it was already making money.

Oh well...

Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#46

Post by drewblay »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #3

This is a pet peeve of mine. When someone talks about having their idea stolen, it really bothers me. It especially bothers me if they tell me "now don't steal my idea, but..." I don't want your idea. I have too many of my own. Here, take some of mine. Most likely, I'll think your idea is shit anyway, because almost all ideas are shit when they are just an idea. For an idea to have value it needs to be backed by some…

The article reminded me a lot of this blog explaining why he doesn't sign NDA's with start-ups.

http://blog.jpl-consulting.com/2012/04/why-i-wont-sign-your-...

Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#47

Post by tinco »

junto wrote: post #25
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to get a new great idea every time I drink a beer. That's what I want to tell friends every time they come to me with a "great idea" I should implement (as business partners, of course). That said, I still love hearing people's ideas. Just don't expect me to act on it.

I need a new side project. Can you give me 5 of your best ideas that you don't want to use? :-)

Please build a project milestone tree site. The idea would be that the users can make a project. Then split that project up in milestones, and then those milestones can be split into more, etc..

I think that fits very well to how the planning for a software project should work. Bonus points if you can make it into a Trello like system where you can assign team members to milestones etc.

Re: So someone "stole" your idea

#48

Post by sliverstorm »

snarfy wrote: post #19
onion2k wrote: post #5

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."

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.
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