Why inviting others to steal your ideas can propel you forward
Moving from a scarce to an abundant mindset
👋 Hey, it’s Jaime. Wishing you a very happy 2024, and welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share how thriving open source projects grow their communities.
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In this week’s newsletter, we’ll cover how to deal with piracy and how to lean into it to use it as leverage, and one condition you must fulfil to make it work.
Read time: 8-ish minutes
Are you afraid of piracy? Or are you looking to patent your ideas so others can’t copy you?
This might be a legitimate fear. But they are probably cutting you off from new opportunities and are leading you to create unnecessary scarcity for yourself and those around you.
4 Ways We Create Unnecessary Scarcity
Patents : While patents are an option, they're really expensive and do nothing to protect you but give you the right to sue. Unless you already have millions to spend on lawyers to go after those copying a physical product, it's a real waste to spend tens of thousands of dollars to patent an idea you thought up in the shower one day. It also leads to more scarcity by slowing down new improvements to an idea and its distribution for 20 years.
And apparently, 97% of patent holders lose money. So those benefiting the most from patents are the WIPO selling those patents.Trademark misuse: There are greedy lawyers who charge by the letter and use search engines to spend their days sending claim letters to anyone who comes close to using a word or phrase they believe their client "owns." Trademark law was designed to clarify who is good at making a product or service and make sure you know who is selling you something. Trademark wasn’t invented to prevent others from identifying the inventor of a word or symbol.
Imagine if I trademarked "Merry-Christmas™”, now you’d have to send me my royalty check whenever you use these words.Copyright misuse: It’s tempting to (mis)use copyright law to protect your ideas. Copyright law feels like it’s designed to allow you to sue people who steal your ideas. But it's not. Ideas are free. Anyone can use them.
Copyright protects the expression of ideas and the particular arrangement of words, sounds, or images.
The Beatles' descendants can't sue those who create 60’s pop rock music… only the people who use their precise expression of lyrics or music.
You can practice your way into becoming very good at expressing yourself, like Stromae or Pharrell Williams, and then no one can copy your expression (and even Pharrell admits he remixes the work of others). But your ideas? They're out there for everyone to improve upon, and that’s good.Suing Pirates: If your work becomes popular, whether it’s a book, an online course, a movie, or whatever you are creating, someone will scan it to create a blurry bootleg version that anyone can download and access. And you have two options: you can fight it or you can use it as leverage.
Nintendo, Ikea, and most music labels chose to invest colossal amounts of money and energy into suing pirated or remixed versions of their products instead of supporting those distributing and creating content for them for free and exposing more people to their work.
Lots of people who download a pirated version of a product wouldn’t be able to get it otherwise, often because of their weak currencies, so stopping them from accessing your work is also slowing down those who want to spread and contribute to your idea and build your reputation.
A smarter and more abundant way of dealing with piracy is to use your pirated version to lead to other paid opportunities. Arduino encourages everyone to create tutorials and new inventions with their microcontroller, leading to more demand for their physical products. Paulo Coelho didn’t have a marketing budget, so he actively pirated and encouraged others to pirate his books on torrent sites in hard-to-reach regions like Russia. He has sold almost 165 million books, so it must be working.
So if you are certain that people will pirate your work, what hooks can you put into your work (without withholding value or frustrating your users or readers) that will allow "free" users to end up helping or buying from you?
What the real challenge is
“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." - Tim O’reilly
The challenge for people who create knowledge, whether it's content, designs, art, software, or data, isn't to spend all the time looking for pirates.
It's to build a platform for reciprocity, a way and a place to get paid or supported for what they create.
This can be selling a physical product or subscriptions like Arduino or Wordpress, receiving donations like Wikipedia, getting public grants like Big Blue Button, offering workshops, consulting, or certifications like the Climate Fresk or Simfony.
Without establishing a way for others to give back, you've got no financial sustainability, and piracy is thus completely irrelevant.
Newspapers aren't in trouble because people are copying the news. They're in trouble because they forgot to build a scalable, profitable online model for commerce.
Open source isn’t in trouble because big companies like the GAFAM are taking from open source without giving back (which is true), but because most of them haven’t offered compelling ways for them to support them.
So, how do you protect your ideas in a world where you can’t stop them from spreading?
You don't.
Instead, you embrace the spreading of your ideas so everyone can learn together.
A great example of that is UnknownDazza, a Tiktoker who shares openly how he designs “housing” for the frogs and other animals in his Australian backyard.
He shows his work in public and invites a community to share his journey.
He builds a thing, people give him feedback, he makes it better, and everyone benefits and learns together. Even the frogs enjoy this collective endeavor!
So you have a few options. Build a reputation as someone:
who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand.
Who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can.
Or use your ideas to earn the trust and permission to reach out to your audience so you can build a relationship with people who are interested.
Invest your energy in being the best woodworker with the sharpest saw, not in being the lawyer who sues any furniture maker who dares to use a saw.
But remember what we said before: you need to create a system of reciprocity where others can give back. And you do that by:
Inviting a community to contribute to what you are creating so that they can distribute it farther and make it better than you can on your own.
Supporting that system based on what’s naturally scarce, not by creating artificial scarcity.
It's often dangerous to put free on top of an existing business model. Things will break down.
People look at free or open intellectual property and think, "Oh, that will never work. If I give x, y, or z away for free, I'll fail."
They're right. They will fail… if they keep the model the same and just give away stuff for free.
The way you win is by understanding what’s abundant and what’s naturally scarce and building around both.
So, for example, Arduino is by giving away their hardware designs or tutorials for free online. The more people come, the more they create new ways of using it and the more microcontrollers they'll sell… turning it into a movement.
Or Seth Godin, publishing his concise and sharp insights online. The more people read his newsletter, the better the scarce parts (his books, his community-based courses, etc.) do.
We’ve spent generations believing that we need to make certain parts of our business scarce through patents, copyright, and anti-piracy laws and use advertising and other barriers abundantly to build a business.
But when you flip this on its head, you need to make something else abundant in order to gain attention.
Then, and only then, will you be able to sell something that's naturally scarce.
And it’s an uncomfortable flip to make because the new scarcity is often hard to find, and we’re tempted to keep charging for what we used to charge.
But, especially in the digital world, this is happening faster than ever.
When a free or open product can’t find a way to become financially sustainable, it is eventually replaced by a paid service.
But when open products or services find ways to create a healthy financial flow, they outcompete any closed alternatives.
If you work in commerce, sell something people find valuable enough to pay for. (e.g., Arduino products, Wordpress hosted solutions, Lululemon pants, Johnny Harris’ Patreon).
If you work as a non-profit, create something compelling and meaningful enough to donate or contribute physically (e.g., Wikipedia’s donations or Project Kamp’s Patreon).
If you work with the state or public grants, build something that helps develop our economic capacity by creating a new industry, jobs, energy, transportation, technological capacity (e.g., RISC-V, housing, etc.), or increases our savings by freeing our economic capacity to invest elsewhere (e.g. Tools that save time or speed up our work), or protects our essential resources (e.g., forests, water, privacy, etc).
Understand what is naturally scarce and sell that. This could be connection to others, access to people’s time, physical products, and more.
Instead of investing your money and energy in trying to prevent others from copying what you’ve done, it’s far easier to embrace piracy and copycats and collaborate with the opportunities they create.
This way you’ll enjoy your pirates’ winds pushing your sails.
"Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” - Howard Aiken
Credit: Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash