It's an interesting post, but I don't know if the problem is as bad as you might think. Of course, people sell intellectual property multiple times frequently. For example:
- If you're an author, you can write a book, and if you're good and lucky, you can sell it to a million people. Shoot, some popular authors write multiple books to a formula, so they basically write the same story with slight differences - and their readers like that.
- If you're a software developer, you might use the same or very similar functions and procedures in many different piece of software. Developers don't rewrite print functions or financial calculations over to make them unique.
I'm sure there are dozens of other examples. Of course, I understand it's not ethical to copy/pasta something you've been paid to develop by a client, but it's not so unethical to use an idea multiple times in different ways and on different platforms.
Anyway, thanks for this insightful post. I think Steemians should consider your points, but I'm just adding my .02 cents (in SBD, of course).
I think you might have missed an element. For the book example, I made an edit to my post that tries to clear that up: it's not about selling it for someone else to consume, it's more about selling it to multiple publishing systems. As on Steemit, you do not pay to read a post in the same way you would pay to read a book. For software development, you don't sell the print function you use to someone else, you sell whatever product you built, and that may include open source libraries, but the open source libraries are not what you're selling: you're selling the specific pieces that you wrote.
p.s. I gave you my first witness vote ever. I really didn't understand that whole thing because I'm new, but I think you do a lot to improve the platform, plus you took time to reply to me. :)
Same here. You're the kind of person I want witnessing.
Right, and I totally agree with your core topic. I guess that's why your original and well-thought-out post did so well. When I write for clients, we do have a plagiarism checker to keep us from even accidentally reusing our words or anybody else's words. Re-using ideas is a bit tougher to police and maybe impossible to avoid sometimes. I was just thinking out loud a bit, and I appreciate you coming by to clarify.