Earlier this week Rafat Ali of the professional blog PaidContent complained strongly that the Wall Street Journal had stolen a story idea from him and published it without accreditation. Rafat is not the first blogger to complain and, as blogs become greater resources for journalists, he won’t be the last.
My response is – so what?! If someone’s talking about an idea you had, surely it should be celebrated!
Traditionally we have learned to be protective of our intellectual property. Copyright has protected ideas – but at the same time, it had restricted the distribution of ideas and the development of creativity. Plagiarism is a dirty word. But should it be?
We aren’t living in that traditional world anymore. We’re living in 2.0/open-source 2005. It’s about participation: a bloggers role, I believe, is to skip our merry way seeding ideas through the blossoming webesphere.
That’s right: a bloggers job is to spread ideas. They may be our ideas or the great ideas of others – but blogging gives an unparalleled way of passing those ideas on to others. PSFK spreads ideas every day – many of the ideas are the cool products or services we’ve seen, other ideas are the contributors’ own thoughts. As we spread our ideas, others will pick up the ideas and spread them further. Fantastic, no?
The reason we write is not to control our ideas, not to look clever. We write to add our ideas to the global discussion.
Let’s look at a traditional example where someone earns money from his or her ideas: Conventionally a conference circuit speaker would be careful about the sharing of their speech and presentation content – their jobs would depend on the restriction of information; providing no transcript at their talks and passing out limited notes. The rationale behind this is that if people spread a speaker’s ideas, they won’t need to turn up to a conference. Earlier this week on IF, I mentioned how a well known circuit speaker is ignoring tradition and embracing openness: Tom Peters is offering EVERYBODY ALL his slides via his site BEFORE he goes on tour. Is this going to mean less people will attend his tours because more people are reading his ideas? What do you think? Tom is spreading his ideas and (if accepted) even more people will want to hear him speak and even more will read his books.
I’m not saying that bloggers should keep quiet about idea theft – but what I’m saying is that they shouldn’t be grumbling about it, they should be celebrating it. Celebrating we’re doing our job right. Rafat Ali should really be shouting, "Look! WSJ is spreading my idea to millions of people I could never have reached! Imagine what could happen next?!"
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