> What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? First, let me preface this that I am not a bi

> What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents. When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like. I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code. If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident. In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.