Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

On Sun, 2004-14-11 at 01:31 -0500, Scott Rubin wrote:
> Ok, so I have a blog, and I have it licensed with the 
> Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. It is very good.
Oh, I'm sure it is. 
> But what if in my 
> blog I write down a new idea I came up with. Say a truly original idea for a new 
> product. If someone reads my blog and makes that product before I do, what 
> rights do I have?
You need to seek patent rights over your ideas. Under the copyright regime, you don't have control over the ideas themselves -- just over their _expression_. If you patent your ideas, then you can control them and sue people who implement them. Yay for you!

My suggestion: don't put any good idea on your blog. Have you noticed how nobody else puts anything interesting on their blogs? It's because of idea stealing. There's all kinds of idea thieves out there waiting to make millions and billions of dollars off your ideas the second you post them to your blog. That's why other bloggers just post about what kind of oatmeal they like and what Tori Amos song they just listened to. They leave out all the good stuff so the idea thieves don't take them to the cleaners.

The bottom line: keep your blog amateurish and dumb. It's simple self-defense!

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan AT bad.dynu.ca                OOO