Oh no... I understand what you're talking about and I wasn't talking about theft of "ideas"... I was talking about outright theft of code (just like plagarism) to actually start a business on or to charge money for. For example, I may have a great way of converting a large dataset like the national and international call system information (either from Telcordia or CCMI... all country codes, city codes, area codes, exchanges, distance info, LEC ownership, tariff info, etc, etc) into normalized tables. While I'm absolutely sure that I'm neither the first nor the best in the world to do such a thing, it does work well and I wouldn't want someone to just copy the code to start a new business with especially if they opened up as a competitor. If they didn't have such code stolen from the clear code our company built, maybe they couldn't find such code from some other source and never become a serious competitor.

As a side bar, I've run into a couple of competitors and worked for a couple of companies that have their own version of code to do the same thing. They'll never be serious competitors with my old company because it takes them 24 hours just to render phone bills for a lousy 90,000 customers and that DIDN'T include collecting the CDR's (call detail records). They also have an IT staff of a couple dozen not to mention the Billing and Finance staff to support it all.

The code I wrote (all of it DOS batch and T-SQL) would do everything from collecting the raw CDRs from multiple sources (FTP, Modem Download, AND a 3 reel physical tape change) to the final rendering of bills for 500,000 customers... in less than 6 hours... on an old 450Mhz P3 w/512 K of RAM... and we only had two people in IT... and we had a (i.e. ONE) part time CPA as our Billing and Finance department.

I agree... my code isn't a new idea but I really wouldn't want to share that code with anyone by accident if I installed that code at a customer site. Encryption can help in that area.