Although accusations of “stole my idea” are often launched, followed by “I will sue!”, The law does not necessarily protect everyone. idea, protects the expressions of ideas.
The mere accusation that someone else stole your idea for a business (or a product or a work of art) is generally not enough to win a lawsuit, not under copyright law, trademark law, trademark law. patents or any other intellectual property law. The law does not protect generalized expressions of ideas; the law protects the implementation of ideas.
There is a good reason for it. While some business ideas are certainly better than others, and while some ideas are really great ideas that no one had before, we can’t justify the burden and expense of a lawsuit every time someone, somewhere, vaguely claims they ever had. a similar idea. The fact is that successful businesses, useful inventions and compelling works of art are all, as Thomas Edison is said to have said, who is more of a crafty businessman than a genius inventor, the invention is one percent inspiration. and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t come up with the idea of creating an online social network, registering the Facebook.com domain, and raising a few billion dollars. Thomas Edison didn’t come up with the idea of laying electrical cables in a vacuum, putting together a lightbulb in one afternoon, and then enjoying his empire. Cormac McCarthy did not come up with the idea for a post-apocalyptic novel, did not release a draft, and compiled his Pulitzer and film waste. They all had ideas, or rather they took pre-existing ideas and then made them work well.
An idea for a light bulb is not a light bulb. Brainstorming for a lightbulb to go out of your head requires a tremendous amount of work, patience, dedication, and perseverance. As Edison said when asked about his many failed light bulb designs, “I haven’t failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.”
Which brings us to the inspiration for this post. One of my kids’ favorite shows was WordWorld, which is probably better summed up with a picture than actual words.
It’s a fun little show in which a couple of animals, themselves built from their own names, use letters to interact and build with various objects in their world. It’s cute, entertaining, and reasonably educational.
What he didn’t know was the contentious animosity in the show’s history. In the 1990s, Kyle Morris and William Kirksley filed several patents regarding animated captions “coordinated with spoken word expressions.” In short, his idea was to show the words coming out of the speaker’s mouth in a children’s movie or television show. Morris invited Don Moody to develop a new children’s television show around the concept, but, after a fight, Moody left and started the hit show Word World which aired on PBS beginning in 2007.
Morris later sued Moody, alleging patent and copyright infringement, including a claim that he owned the copyright to the phrase “where words come to life” that Word World uses as a catchphrase, and a claim in the ” teaching methodology “that he had developed. .
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, however, dismissed Morris’s patent and copyright claims and the Federal Circuit asserted without an opinion. In short, Word World was similar to the original idea, and almost certainly took elements from it, but not enough to constitute patent or copyright infringement.
I mean, Morris had an idea, tried to make it work, asked for help to make it work, but for whatever reason he couldn’t make it work. One of the people you brought in accepted the idea, made some changes, and made it work. In fact, the light bulb went out.
So who, as a matter of law, “invented” WordWorld? The same person who “invented” the light bulb: the one who made it work.
