Blog #317 – Reading time: about 1.3 minutes

Welcome to the age of AI chatbots and other blatant copyright scorners.

With that cheerful scene set, I have a trick question for you. Can you really own your ideas?

Before you answer, consider the number of people you interact with daily, the clouds of information on the Internet, and the number of books published to date. (Who knows? Over 200 million?)

So, where did your latest idea come from?

A social media post you saw this morning? Something you heard yesterday? A book you read last year? A movie you saw as a kid? Or a lightning bolt that selected special-you to receive its unique, never-thought-of-before gift?

As you know from experience, people pick up on thoughts. Once you have thought a thought, it is out there, beyond your control. And that’s even before you’ve expressed it in words. (Mystics and quantum physicists blame this on the interconnectedness of all things.)

Ideas are creations set free by thinking.

That’s why you cannot own ideas. You just don’t know where they came from. And you don’t know where they are going next.

Do you still believe you should lock up your ideas? Don’t. Because the more you share ideas, the more they come back to you much improved.

Like love, some things are simply not diminished when given away.

Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.

(Am I against copyright? Nope. But I got you thinking, yes?)