I recently finished two books on the birth and growth of the computer industry: Steven Levy’s classic Hackers, and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Both left me pondering the topic of stealing ideas. For it’s Jobs who once said so memorably:

Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Yet in Isaacson’s book, Jobs is also at his most vitriolic when talking about the brazen temerity of others daring to steal Apple’s ideas. To wit: 

On Microsoft Windows:

They just ripped us off completely, because [Bill] Gates has no shame.”

On Google:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

Now one might write off this contradiction as simply being characteristic of the late, mercurial CEO. But these days, stealing ideas seems to have become an accepted, encouraged part of culture. In a great piece about the digital creative meritocracy, Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova quotes Robert Levine, author of a new book on the topic, Free Ride.

In Silicon Valley, the information that wants to be free is almost always the information that belongs to someone else.

That’s what Jobs was saying. It’s perfectly ok for Apple to steal other people’s ideas. But anyone stealing from them should hang his or her head in shame for being such a low form of humanity.

This idea of stealing ideas is also touched upon in Hackers, which concludes with the fascinating story of Richard Stallman’s efforts to subvert work at Symbolics, a company he felt violated the hacker code of the free flow of information. His revenge: to reverse engineer every development Symbolics introduced and hand it, for free, to the company’s main rival, LMI.

For me, the whole topic raises a ton more questions than it supplies answers. For example, if anyone can steal an idea and reproduce it wholesale then does that imply that the idea wasn’t that great in the first place? When is building on someone else’s idea ok (standing on the shoulders of giants)? And when is it, you know, plain old, actual theft? Would love to hear your thoughts.