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

from the locking-up-knowledge dept

An anonymous reader called our attention to a comment reposting some fantastic thinking on the dangerous trend of believing we can own, sell or steal ideas. The comment was in response to a post on Slashdot from a college student worried that his professors were "stealing" his ideas. The commenter posted a bit from The Zen of Graphics Programming, by Michael Abrash, who among other things co-wrote the game Quake. The whole blurb is worth reading, but there are two things worth calling out. First, he points out that the idea is rarely the important part:

This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I've noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else's hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, "I'm so smart that my ideas alone set me apart." Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime's worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it's not the ideas; it's design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.

Second, he points out how ridiculous a scenario it is when everyone "owns" the ideas they came up with, and what it would lead to:

A closely related point is the astonishing lack of gratitude some programmers show for the hard work and sense of community that went into building the knowledge base with which they work. How about this? 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.

Put that way, it sounds like a silly idea, but the idea behind software patents is precisely that eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifylng and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.

Exactly. The only unfortunate bit in the piece is that he then talks about an encounter with the author Neal Stephenson, where the two talked about the importance of sharing ideas and using networks to spread cheap or free tools to unleash the next creative genius. I'm a fan of Stephenson's work, and I'm sure that he at times talks up such things, but recently Stephenson has gone over to the other side, working part-time at Intellectual Ventures, one of the worst of the worst in terms of companies that are really trying to build a world where ideas are owned and limited. It's a shame that someone like Stephenson would get involved in such a project.

Filed Under: ideas, michael abrash, ownership