71–80 of 94 posts
Stealth mode has its benefits...
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…
A few years ago, I wrote a puzzle game called Coco Loco. It was an angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with to solve the puzzles more easily.
I had a free demo out of the first 10 levels, it got good feedback from testers, and I was ready to roll out a version with 50 levels.
Then, another angry birds style "throw the thing at the other thing and collect the things" but with actual puzzles and items you could deform the levels with, called Coco Loco (trademark), got released.
My initial reaction was that they'd taken my name, my level ideas, and put a larger team on it to get the game out.
Of course, they hadn't.
Turns out, we had both come up with very similar ideas, and the exact same name, at the same time.
These things happen. Thankfully, all the puzzle design work I did could be applied to my current project, Spheretic. (http://notnowlewis.com/spheretic/ if anyone's interested!)
Is there a difference between having your idea stolen and being to far ahead of your time? It would seem OP inferred that was part of the problem: "In 2009, Charoo and I built Viewpointr. It was ahead of its time and today, Biz Stone and co, launched Jelly.co. They seem to have got it right… time will tell." Sometimes I guess you just have to wait until the market is ready for your product? As opposed to arguing some…
If we operated on a different location in the economic parameter space we would solve a problem, and if it didn't fit into the current graph, we would shelve it only to reactivate it later when it could fit.
A dormant prototype can be a very powerful thing.
It seems very much like /r/whatisthisthing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need a new side project. Can you give me 5 of your best ideas that you don't want to use? :-)
@ 1. Craigslist style email obfuscation as a service. problem: i have a marketplace type website where my users would like to be contacted but not have their emails be made public. how it works: i set a subdomain of my site, mail.mysite.com to an ip address you designate. on demand, i make an api call to your service (emailobfuscationasaservice.com) with { real_address:foo@bar.com, expiration_timestamp:2014-01-20T00:…
I'm pretty sure 1 exists as well, but I can't remember the name.
Is there a difference between having your idea stolen and being to far ahead of your time? It would seem OP inferred that was part of the problem: "In 2009, Charoo and I built Viewpointr. It was ahead of its time and today, Biz Stone and co, launched Jelly.co. They seem to have got it right… time will tell." Sometimes I guess you just have to wait until the market is ready for your product? As opposed to arguing some…
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20081219115548/http://vark.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need a new side project. Can you give me 5 of your best ideas that you don't want to use? :-)
@ 1. Craigslist style email obfuscation as a service. problem: i have a marketplace type website where my users would like to be contacted but not have their emails be made public. how it works: i set a subdomain of my site, mail.mysite.com to an ip address you designate. on demand, i make an api call to your service (emailobfuscationasaservice.com) with { real_address:foo@bar.com, expiration_timestamp:2014-01-20T00:…
The realization came when I was exchanging contact info with a stranger on CL who was selling an iPhone.Why was this person now privy to my G+ profile? my phone number? etc...
The service would create "channels", each with a temporary telephone number (that works with texting) and an email. You use these to communicate with the seller/buyer/whatever and when you're done you disable the channel.
To communicate you would download an app to your phone that allows you to view messages and reply, or even place calls.
Anyways I didn't build it because I wasn't passionate enough about the idea, and I figured it would mostly be used for nefarious purposes. Also, there are some legal implications if somebody becomes the victim of a crime while meeting someone using my anonimized communication service.
Implementation of this technical problem left as an exercise for the person who "steals" this idea.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse, they imply that an idea is a tangible thing, owned by someone. Some type of property, that can be stolen and thus deprive you of something.
Well, they kinda are, otherwise what is intellectual property?
In the case of trademarks, you are allowed to prevent people from using a particular name (in order to keep that name unique and meaningful).
In the case of patents, you are allowed to prevent people from "using your idea" (even if it's also their idea). Supposedly this encourages people to develop ideas to the point where they're actually useful (and patentable), but looking at history they don't actually help.
In the case of copyright, you are allowed to prevent people from duplicating or building on your ideas (but in theory not from doing the same thing independently). Similar to patents, this doesn't appear to provide the benefits it's meant to (but it isn't quite as clear).
In no case is an idea a piece of intellectual property. Instead, the property is the right to prevent certain actions. The two cases of (attempted) intellectual property theft that I've heard of are the lawsuits by SCO around the Unix copyrights, and some guy in Florida (I think) who sued the author of some open-source Java model railroad software (I think this had to do with patents rather than copyright).