SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Microsoft has announced a competition for student filmmakers in the U.K. designed to highlight the problem of “Thought Thieves”, those who profit by stealing the original creativity of others and pass it off as their own work. Tim Ryan, a student at Carbuncle-on-Ness middle school, details his idea for the film.

“The story is about a group of software enthusiasts who start out by selling their implementation of somebody else’s easy to use programming language. Then, as they try to pay the bills, they find an opportunity to buy an operating system and sell it to a third party. With the money they made off of that, they mimic a popular spreadsheet application, ape a popular word processor, and rip off the user interface of another operating system. Finally, when they can’t figure out how to update their operating system themselves, they hire away the staff of another company and pay them to do it for them, and then did things like buy the companies that they ripped off after loosing in court and use the network stack from a competitor and then lie about it.”

“Basically, it’s a story about the slow decline to the dark side, and how a giant corporation forgets that literally every piece of nontrivial software they’ve ever produced was based on the creative work of someone else.”