Can you successfully sue an entrepreneur for stealing your idea and nothing else?
I learnt how to bake a pineapple upside down cake. I perused through 25 recipes online, read a couple of recipe books and asked my mother. Failed at making the dough. Cursed miserably at the god of cakes. Somehow managed to add the perfect amount of flour and ingeniously added cinnamon essence in the right quantity. Stirred in the right amount of air and baking powder. Iteratively tasted the sugar for perfection. Set it in the oven for just the right amount of time. The cake is ready after a dozen trials. It tastes good. I think i could make it better. Now i know.My friend stands just beside me when i ask him to taste it. He asks me how did you make it. I hesitate. Why should i share my recipe with him? Why should he gain my insights for free, he might steal my recipe and publish it. Why should i waste my toil and sweat by just handing him my secret? Does he deserve it? Of course not. Well, he is my friend, i ll tell him how i did it.The next day, i speak to my classmate, he describes most delightfully about my friend's amazing cake he baked for the class. The whole class surrounds him, cheering him on his genius. I feel cheated and storm off deciding never to speak to my friend again.Your idea, even if stolen, is yours. You went through the process of acquiring it and it is only you who knows how to expand and generalize over it.If you didn't know the utility of your idea, you needed another idea to make it work. If your idea has been augmented and then implemented, you would have required a helping hand to make your primal one succeed.Always keep in mind that success comes from an intricate weave of circumstances. So don't go hard on yourself. Pick yourself up and persevere. Believe in yourself.Remember, knowledge grows from sharing. You are a better person if you share your bit with the world. Cynicism is a trait not for the purpose of acquiring knowledge. I reach home, desolate. I open the door and find my parents' smiling faces peering towards me. They have a letter in their hand. They inform me that i have been awarded the scholarship i was longing for. The dinning table has a cake on it. It is a pineapple upside down cake. My friend it standing beside it. He congratulates me and tells me that he baked the cake for me, with my recipe. I eat a piece of the cake, it tastes heavenly. There is a smile on my face.