In my last post, I mentioned a thread on Puppet Hub, then talked about the value of being stolen from (essentially, though not in those words). I thought that I’d post my comments from that thread here (which are different from the comments I made in my previous post), saving you the 1/2 second of clicking a link and finding me amid the other execellent comments:

I’m proud of the work that I do, and I want to show it off. There would still be value for me to do it even if nobody ever saw it, but why keep it quiet?

I see a number of people talking about ideas that were stolen. Now, certainly, that’s a reasonable concern if you’re Disney or the Muppets — you’re a cultural force, and millions know about you — but is it really that reasonable if you’re not that large? And isn’t it quite flattering on a level to think that your idea struck someone as being good enough to copy?

I would wonder — and this is going to sound like me being a jerk, when it’s not my intent — how unique the claimed ideas stolen really were. Someone said something about a puppet in a pot; what else was unique about it? I have images in my head of most people who are concerned about this and are small scale taking a pre-existing design and adding a mustache to it, then seeing someone else who thought of the same thing and adding their own mustache. Is that the theft of an idea? Is the idea being stolen unique?

Where did the pot idea come from, by the way? Nothing happens in a vacuum, and given the way that everyone gets roughly the same media sent to them at the same time (despite a person’s ability to get exactly the kind of links sent their way as they may like, we all seem to know about the big cute thing), I’d wonder if the thing that sparked an idea in you wasn’t the same thing that the other person saw, which also sparked an idea.

Theft of ideas is certainly a serious thing, and I would definitely not suggest ignoring specific violations (such as people building and selling Muppet replicas without permission and rather unabashedly calling them Muppets), but conceptual stuff is rather hard to pin down, and is the idea “yours” to begin with?

Culture grows by the spreading of ideas, and every idea anyone has is based on a pre-existing idea. Not everything is theft, but everything is built on what came before it, and often times the idea that occurs to you when you see something in the world is going to be the same idea that occurs to another person, because it’s the most obvious connection to draw.

How many of you would be making puppets today, for example, if you hadn’t seen puppetry out there in the world and said “I want to do that exact thing?”

The other day, I saw a cardinal in a tree in my yard, and I took a photo because I thought it would make a neat design for a puppet. I routinely photograph things that strike me as interesting for reference later while building, and I scour the net actively for images that I can draw upon later as inspiration. I’m not stealing, though, I’m being influenced, just as everyone else is influenced by everything they see. (I store them here, in a public feed on Evernote: http://www.evernote.com/pub/hoggworks/PuppetPhotoRef)

Of course, all of this is to say nothing of the fact that if you don’t put yourself out there for the world to see, not only will you never have your ideas stolen (and, really, it’s the execution that’s FAR more valuable than the idea itself), which is to say that you’ll never be able to fail, but you’ll also never be able to succeed.

I, for one, am happy to take the risk that I’ll have my ideas stolen if it brings with it a risk that I’ll be a success at what I’m trying to do.