Stealmill

“Good artists imitate, great artists steal.”  

T.S. Eliot

The best creativity is generally a kind of theft. 

Because it is a social enterprise as well as a private habit, new ideas tend to emerge from other ones, innovations from previous breakthroughs.

Stealing work outright is a no-no of course, but concepts and ideas are open season.  In fact, it is a job description for a creative person to be able to look around, be open to influence, and see what other people are up to.  And rip them off…er, that is, be influenced by them.

Most folks who are not used to it, think that they have to generate all ideas from their own knowledge base but they soon find out how limited personal experience is.  And also how limiting, since it is easy to get stuck in one’s own restricted set of notions.  It takes humility to realize that there are a lot of great ideas out there and a lot of them are a heck of a lot better than yours.  So why not work with them?  Why not use them?  Why not rely on them?

In other words, if you want to build a decent Ingenarium, you have to also run a stealmill.

The trick, of course, is knowing the difference between an inspiration and a lawsuit, between being influenced and being sued.  It is an amazing and chilling fact of creativity that the line between the two is not all that clear even for professionals.  Courtrooms are filled with people trying to work out this difference in the visual arts, music, literature, and invention.

Johan Gutenberg pulled together disparate elements to create the printing revolution but did he borrow from existing technologies or simply grab them?  Certainly the parts and pieces of his invention already existed; movable type was used in China for 300 years and the screw press was already used in winemaking.  But without any inventor around to sue him for either one, his use of existing innovations is pure creativity not infringement.

In the 1920s a woman by the name of Lizzie Magie invented a game called The Landlord’s Game in which players moved little pieces around a board, landed on squares, and bought and sold properties.  It was set in New York and the squares were labeled Broadway, Wall Street, and so on.  A decade later during the Depression, a man named Charles Darrow took (or borrowed or stole or was influenced by) this idea to come up with his own game.  He simplified the design, changed the location to Atlantic City and invented Monopoly, the best-selling board game of all time.

Magie fans say he was a scoundrel who ripped off her idea.  Darrow’s backers say he transformed it and made it his own.  Take your pick, the distinction can be quite vague.

The movie Flash of Genius showed a similar battle being waged in the effort to invent an intermittent windshield wiper via a years-long court case that eventually found in favor of Robert Kearns, the inventor.  The title of the film was based on the so-called Flash of Genius Doctrine in patent law that said an invention had to come about by a truly innovative insight rather than simple tinkering or altering.  Sounds simple enough but the confusions arising from it led to the rejection of the doctrine by 1952.  A more recent movie called The Social Network raised the same issues of creative ideas and breakthroughs, and just what can be stolen and what cannot, and was equally inconclusive.

So the moral about your stealmill?  You have to run it carefully and thoughtfully.  Ideas are fair game, actual things are not.  But the line is permeable and open to interpretation by juries.  The goal here is not to abuse the creativity of others but, nonetheless, to rely on useful ideas when we find them.  In other words, we need to be open to influence but shut to outright theft.  And know a good lawyer just in case.