[alicebot-aiethics] stealing ideas

[Dr. Richard S. Wallace]

I often say that the only people who believe that ideas are valuable are
those who never have any.  I never seem to run out of ideas.  I  have way
more ideas than time in my life to implement them.  When I was younger I was
afraid that I might run out of ideas in my old age, so I would hastily write
down every idea for a program, painting, song lyric, invention, or anything
else that ran across my mind, thinking that I would save it for the day when
the ideas ran out and I could finish the job.  Now I realize this day will
never come, and if I continued doing that old strategy, I would have nothing
but notebooks of half-baked ideas.

With that background, let us consider the problem of what it means to "steal
an idea" in the context of free software, specifically ALICE and AIML
business plans.  We have published a list of Top 10 "killer apps" for AIML
partly for the reason that these ideas have been in the idea for so long and
held by so many people and it is almost impossible to say who "thought of"
the concept of, for example, a celebrity bot, first.

One of the first celebrity bots was the John Lennon bot by David Maggin.
Forget about the legal arguments for a second.  As an ethical matter among
professional botmasters, we all respect the fact that "John Lennon" is
taken.  Anyone else creating another John Lennon AIML bot might justifiably
be criticized for stealing David's idea.  There may be nothing anyone can
do, David may or may not have the proper legal protections on the name "John
Lennon", but in our heart of hearts we know, and in the long view of
history, David Maggin made the first John Lennon bot.

But suppose Joe Jones approaches me and says, "I have a great idea for a
Marilyn Monroe bot," and no one else has yet created a Marilyn Monroe bot.
Then Joe Jones disappears for a couple of years.  Later, Jane Jackson
appears on the mailing list and announces that she has completed and
released the Marilyn Monroe bot.   It may emerge that in private
conversations, Jane and I had talked about celebrity bots, and I had even
mentioned the name, "Marilyn Monroe."   Or suppose I had even said, "This
guy Joe Jones told me he was going to work on a Marilyn Monroe bot."

Knowing that Joe Jones and I had no NDAs or other confidentiality
agreements, did I do anything wrong?  Joe Jones now reappears and accuses me
and Jane of stealing his idea.  Of course, he has not implemented the
Marilyn Monroe bot.  Jane may have written 40,000 Marilyn Monroe categories
and Joe zero, but he still claims it was his idea and we stole it.   Some
Joe Jonses might even claim that I gave away the whole idea of celebrity
bots to Jane.

In conclusion, my standard for stealing ideas in the world of AIML is
evolving toward something more like plagiarism than patent infringement.
Building bots is more about work than ideas.  If Joe Jones had written an
AIML set and owned the exclusive copyright, and then that content appeared
in Jane's bot, it would be no different than lifting text from a novel or a
newspaper.  But if Joe Jones only had the idea for the same kind of bot, I
don't think he can claim that Jane stole anything.  There should be some
hard documentable evidence for the alleged theft, such as side-by-side
comparisons of AIML templates.  A vague comparison of "his idea" and "my
idea" hardly constitutes such evidence.


Rich