I think you should steal other people’s ideas. (Hope the FBI is not listening.) Indeed, I’m planning a big heist. Please, however, let me be up front in asserting (the FBI would say “alledging”) that there’s a big, huge difference between copyright infringement and out-right stealing. I only want to steal, not to infringe.
Copyright infringement involves making money from someone else’s commercially viable ideas. I love money, but making it has never been a forte. And, in any case, I’m too honest to do that kind of stealing. Also, if I could make money from somebody else’s ideas, I suppose I could as easily make money off my own! The stealing that I advocate and to which I aspire involves enlarging your mind from someone else’s ideas.
Stealing, as I figure it, is very difficult to do because it requires first off that you be aware what the other person’s ideas are. Sometimes you think you know, but in fact you don’t. You can steal the ideas that you think belong to them — that would be the idea you see inside their stuff. Unfortunately, you’re only stealing what you see, and “what you see is what you get.” That’s actually a very wise saying.
So that thing you see, you decide to steal! But that “je ne sais quoi” may not be the actual idea, not the real McCoy, which is why “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but is not the big heist. And thus copies often advertise themselves in bright neon as being the not quite ready for prime time wonders that they are. Sigh.
The real ideas of truly original minds, though they sit in plain sight, lie hidden often under thick veils tied with seven seals. They are hidden in the glass-enclosed transparent vault of insight as thick and as strong as life itself.
Above, I drew my copy of some Picasso figures some years ago. These are his ideas that I thought back then to steal — and what I got … well, I’ll be counting the loot later on, someday, but it’s still not the Big Heist.
Aletha Kuschan's Weblog 