If you asked any of my friends, family or blog readers what I do, they would say that I’m a writer. Not an exceptional one. Not a poor one. But a writer, nonetheless. With that, I can confidently say that the source of much of my writing comes from many other’s ideas. I stole them, and I’m not ashamed.
I’m not ashamed of the A’s I get on my writing assignments because I take someone’s idea. I’m not ashamed of my blog readership because I steal other bloggers’ ideas. I’m not ashamed of all the ideas I’ve taken by observation throughout the day and written down in my journal at night. I’m not ashamed because I’ve built off every idea.
All ideas you read in your textbooks, catch online or hear from your friends and colleagues can be traced back to a single stolen idea. That is, until those who took the idea thought to themselves, “This could be better if … ” Great ideas aren’t just made up out of thin air. Great ideas are nothing like epiphanies. Great ideas are made when people steal an idea and make it better.
Recently the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation sued Apple Inc. for allegedly infringing on a U.S. patent on computer technology. I’m far from empathetic about the situation, but there’s a logical explanation for WARF’s pursuit.
If you create something and then someone steals your idea — replicating it for profit and refusing to attribute the ideas origin — then, yes. Sue them. (My only concern is that by the time the lawsuit is concluded, the idea for the computer technology will have been improved upon tenfold by others who stole the idea).
Passionately stated by Seth Godin, “The essential thing to remember, though, is that every project is the work of a thousand generations, of decisions leading to decisions, of the unpredictable outcomes that come from human interactions.”
I’m shocked at how adamant the University of Wisconsin is regarding patents and plagiarism. As a research-based institution, you would think to hear professors propagate to students something along the lines of “Don’t take any other author’s words unless you plan on expanding on them in a way that was not originally done.”
Instead, students are excessively reminded (and for those GPA-dependent students who over-think professors’ instructions, scared shitless) to not take anyone’s ideas. That is stealing.
How hard is it to tell students to take any author’s work, attribute what is word-for-word and develop the work into something better than what it was. That is how progress is made. Are we not teaching students to strive for progress on campus?
The answer is that we say we are striving for progress, but we find ourselves boxed into guidelines and filled with fear of crossing any one of them. It’s a grave mistake how we are thinking about ideas in an industrialist way (mine, mine, mine).
If you stole my wallet or my ego or my books, you would cause real harm and stress to me. But my ideas? Please, take them. The more you take the stronger we all become.
Oh, and by the way, I stole this idea from a blog post on www.blog.ted.com. All I can hope for is that I made it better. And if I didn’t, at least I tried. Something we might all want to take more risks to do, whether academically or not.
Garth Beyer ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism.
