Today I overheard some people talking about Twitter and Facebook. They were talking about lots of uninteresting things, in my opinion, but there was one thing in particular which caught my attention. I call it The Business Is Evil Argument. It goes something like this:
Person A: Facebook recently claimed that they own all your data you place on Facebook forever.
Person B: Really? Wow. That has interesting Intellectual Property fallout. What if you ask your friends via Facebook whether they like an idea you have for a startup? If you then go pursue that idea, Facebook could wipe you out by saying the idea is actually theirs because they own the data where you conceived of the idea.
This is what I call The Business Is Evil Argument. It’s the equivalent of spreading FUD. Consider me naive, but I believe the majority of companies actually like their customers and users and want to provide them with a valuable service. They wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t, and they certainly wouldn’t be successful.
In this case, why would Facebook ever want to steal your idea that you happened to message to a few friends on their service? Doing that would bring such punishment from their users (remember the News Feed/Beacon/TOS/etc backlash?) that after just once, everyone would flee the service.
