Stealing Ideas Is Fine
It’s fine to take anyone’s idea you want and just use it without permission.
Well that’s it, that’s all I really wanted to say, but one has to justify these things, right?
A couple of things happened on Twitter today. Firstly Matt Pearson and I got into a discussion about using other people’s ideas, and then someone at the Brighton Dome Twitter feed posted this link, to the video of an impromptu dance routine set to the song Do-Re-Mi from The Sound Of Music. In the tweet in question the link had simple been preceeded by the phrase ‘Guaranteed to put a smile on your face :)’ which was both ambiguous and promising enough for me to click it out of sure curiosity. As it continued to download I first saw that it was a YouTube page and then that it was going to be a dance routine in the foyer of a train station in Antwerp.
My heart sank a bit. ‘OK’ I thought, ‘fine, not very original but that’s OK, maybe it’s fun’ and carried on watching, which I’m glad I did because it did actually put a smile on my face. The idea, though, that it wasn’t very original, and that initial hit of despondency, sprung from the fact that I’ve seen this sort of thing a few times before. AFAIK the original is the Liverpool Street train station routine for T-Mobile, although please do correct me if you know otherwise. Right or wrong, the point remains that this sort of thing has been done before. Take, for instance, the BouncE Flash Mob in the Gröna Lund theme park in Stockholm. That’s just another example I happen to know of, but there are doubtless countless others.
Even if the Liverpool Street one wasn’t the first (and my guess would be that it wasn’t) the point remains that it can be traced back to a former routine. And that former routine can be traced back to something else, perhaps the infamous Phillipino prisoners ‘Thriller’ routine. Maybe someone saw that and thought ‘hold on, if we just move the location to a train station…’ And where did the governor of the prison (or whoever it was) get his idea from? Perhaps he was watching the video for Thriller and thought ‘hold on, if we just substitute prisoners for dancers…’ And the people who made the Thriller video, where did they get their ideas from? What’s the line of inheritance? An older video, a Broadway musical, an opera, a stage play, a Medieval mystery play?
Matt Pearson was arguing that if you plan to use someone else’s idea you should go through a 3 step process:
- Steal it
- Improve it
- Give it back
I’m not so sure myself, why not just take it? If it doesn’t need to be improved upon, why bother doing so? The people that choreographed the Sound Of Music routine in Antwerp train station didn’t add anything at all, but my day would have been cheaper without having seen it. In fact, if the only example of that idea in existence was the original - whether it be the Liverpool Street one or not - the whole world would be cheapened.
No. Just take stuff, and do what you will with it. If you DO improve on an idea, then sure, try to plough it back in. But if not, don’t worry, just take it. The world is better place when ideas belong to it rather than people.
Matt’s other point was about ‘incentivisation’. As far as I can tell, this is about money, or kudos, or something: if you’ve had an idea then you deserve to benefit from it in some way first, then others can have a go later. Maybe it’s a fair point but I couldn’t give a monkey’s really. I need money to pay my mortgage and eat, but beyond that I don’t care and I don’t think anyone else should really. Ideas will escape anyway: let them go. Just finding out new stuff is incentive enough for me, and if you need a few lousy bucks in your pocket to make you get up and do sometimes your motives are suspect anyway.
The more important point, for me, is that you shouldn’t feel constrained by the notion that an idea has already been put into practice by someone else, you can’t or shouldn’t use it. Bullshit! If it works for you, just go in there and get it!
That’s what Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney did. When they made that awful song ‘Ebony & Ivory‘ together they did a round of promotion afterwards, during which one interviewer asked how they wrote their songs. In reply, one of them (I can’t remember which) said ‘We just steal them, right?’ At which point the other concurred and the first continued. ‘There’s so much great music already in the world you don’t have to write anything new, just take a few bits from a few songs you love, weave them together, and there you go: new material.’
November 4th, 2009 at 8:25 am
I’d just like to point out that this post, all the words used herein, the “courier” font, and the name “richard” were all actually my idea. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.
It was Lennon, I believe, who said that all the Beatles songs came out of them trying to “do” someone else. But if they’d just done straight facsimiles we wouldn’t know their work today, it is only because they took the inspiration and did something interesting with it that we remember them.
That’s not to say you can’t have a jolly night out seeing a covers band, or watching the bloody X-Factor, but IMHO, culturally, just copying is not enough.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Is is undoubtedly much better to try to build upon an idea instead of just using it, but some ideas are just so perfect it would be hard to see how they could be bettered. They well be practical ideas instead, like the wheel example I was talking about on Twitter. How exactly is one going to improve uponn the wheel (by which I mean the basic concept of the wheel)? One isn’t but if application of the wheel was limited to its Babylonian inventors, transport sure would be tricky.
That we can all access and use the idea of the wheel is obviously better than it just being in the hands of an Iraqi elite.
Ideas out!
November 19th, 2009 at 8:33 am
Hey,hey
I suggest you check out the method in Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism. Quoted in wikipedia as “Dialectical Materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx which he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel and joining it to the Materialism of Feuerbach, extracting from it a concept of progress in terms of the contradictory, interacting forces called the thesis and antithesis, culminating at a critical nodal point where one overthrows the other, giving rise to the synthesis, and applying it to the history of social development and deriving therefrom an essentially revolutionary concept of social change.” A better way of putting it than ’stealing’ maybe.
But then there’s the quote from TS Eliot:
“Mediocre writers borrow, great artists steal” (also quoted in orbifics latest post…coincidentally)
http://tinyurl.com/yhx6nch
That is all. Hope you’re well.
Ellen
November 28th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
just found you and I like you.
to your recent commentor - I’d like to challenge anyone to copy without modification in the form of error, inspirational improvisation, or just plain incompetence. The truth is: copying is not easy to the point of banality: it is difficult to the point of absurdity. Copying is creative, since it inevitably entails the collaboration of infidelity, infelicity, ineffability, and incompetence - as players in the production of derivative products.
to your more recent commentor - didn’t picasso say that first? but then, who cares who said it first? more importantly, is it a worthwhile thing to say? YES! - since we continue to say it with infidelity, infelicity, ineffability and incompetence.
j
November 29th, 2009 at 8:56 am
Well said Joe. I have communicated same before only not in such a succinct, clear way as you just have.
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