Ideas are not for sharing

So don’t read this.

Seriously, I’m beginning to wonder about our approach to ideas.  There’s a burgeoning fear that ideas will be stolen, that we must do everything in our power to prevent the spread of ideas.  Funny that, because I always thought that ideas were worth sharing (I’ve watched too many TED videos). Okay, not all ideas are worth sharing, but most are.  But we’re starting to lock ideas up behind so many technologies, to make it difficult to share them.  And you know what, I think I’ve finally decided that if you think your idea is so important that you can only share it in a protected document (eg a PDF that is image based rather than text based, thank you very much for that Publishing Houses), well, I’m not going to give it any more airtime.

Seriously, I don’t know why I cannot simply copy and paste from a document, to keep the spirit of the original within sight while I work it into my own ideas.  And every time I find something tied up in copyright protection, I want to delete it.  Protection my left nut!

(Speaking of which, I should probably find a non-copyright protected version of my own thesis (protected despite my request otherwise) and dump it somewhere where it can be useful.)

COPY THESE WORDS: I want to share ideas widely.  I want to find and build upon other ideas easily. I want to stand on the shoulders of giants and know that I could not have gotten there without them.  I want to share and learn! STEAL THIS HYPERTEXT!

Reference: Douglas Eyman, 1996, Hypertext And/As Collaboration in the Computer-Facilitated Writing Classroom, Kairos, 1(2)

EDIT: This is what cheesed me off this morning – an image-based PDF.

No reference provided. There’s enough information there if you want to get cheesed off too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 8:45 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.