I guess the way I feel about ideas is that you don't own an idea just for having described it once, thus if someone else implements it they didn't steal it eith

I guess the way I feel about ideas is that you don't own an idea just for having described it once, thus if someone else implements it they didn't steal it either. In my opinion, you don't even own an idea that you've implemented poorly. Thus if someone else thinks they can implement it well, they didn't steal the idea. You own an idea when you've implemented it well, maybe even really really well. Before that it's just a proof of concept. And even then you still don't own the idea, you've just got bragging rights to it. A good example would be the tablet. In the minds of most people, Apple owns that concept, everybody else are imitating it; that's what Apple gets for making the first really good implementation of it, even though Microsoft and a bunch of other companies made several really poor implementations of it years before.