While this is well established legally, I don't think the principles involved are well understood.
Legally, you cannot steal an idea, because you cannot own an idea. There were sound reasons for making this the case. Those reasons stand up today and are clearly for the public good.
Intellectual property is intended to cover works (copyright), methods (patents), and identity (trademarks). Both works and methods are recognised as expressions of ideas, and in an ideal world should belong to noone as well. This is why copyright and patents expire. Those specific grants of temporary possession are to incentivise more things being done.
The belief that you own something because you thought it up has become common, but it is not beneficial to society. It is a moral value asserted but rarely explored. It is certainly in the interests of the wealthy accumulators of intellectual property to maintain that public perception. The 'You wouldn't download a car' may not have stopped piracy much but as a part of a broader campaign of instilling a value in the public mind it appears to have been massively successful. Those beliefs used to be the corporate opinion, now they are entrenched in the younger generation as they use their anger against the growing wealth inequality to fight against AI in a manner ultimately beneficial to those forces that bought about the wealth inequality.
Movements like the pirate party, open source, the EFF fought against those notions. Often the phrase "Information wants to be free" was used. It is, unfortunately, hard to fight the steady drumbeat of well financed PR firms. As one PR chap once described the process "limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand"
(I apologise for the length of my post, I use comment writing to organise my thoughts on a topic)
Patent law doesn't only cover methods, though. It might've worked that way during the Industrial Revolution, but these days a lot of patents are far closer to covering abstract ideas than concrete machines. Software patents are some of the worst offenders here, of course.
Legally, you cannot steal an idea, because you cannot own an idea. There were sound reasons for making this the case. Those reasons stand up today and are clearly for the public good.
Intellectual property is intended to cover works (copyright), methods (patents), and identity (trademarks). Both works and methods are recognised as expressions of ideas, and in an ideal world should belong to noone as well. This is why copyright and patents expire. Those specific grants of temporary possession are to incentivise more things being done.
The belief that you own something because you thought it up has become common, but it is not beneficial to society. It is a moral value asserted but rarely explored. It is certainly in the interests of the wealthy accumulators of intellectual property to maintain that public perception. The 'You wouldn't download a car' may not have stopped piracy much but as a part of a broader campaign of instilling a value in the public mind it appears to have been massively successful. Those beliefs used to be the corporate opinion, now they are entrenched in the younger generation as they use their anger against the growing wealth inequality to fight against AI in a manner ultimately beneficial to those forces that bought about the wealth inequality.
Movements like the pirate party, open source, the EFF fought against those notions. Often the phrase "Information wants to be free" was used. It is, unfortunately, hard to fight the steady drumbeat of well financed PR firms. As one PR chap once described the process "limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand"
(I apologise for the length of my post, I use comment writing to organise my thoughts on a topic)