The Stolen Claim

You did the work.

You had the insight. You refined it. You put it into the world—a blog post, a tweet, a conversation, a presentation. You shared it generously because that's what you do with ideas.

And then you watched someone else get the credit.

Maybe they repackaged it with better marketing. Maybe they had a bigger audience and your idea surfed their reach. Maybe they claimed it was theirs. Maybe they didn't even realize where it came from—ideas are slippery, and people genuinely forget sources.

Doesn't matter. The result is the same: you did the mining, someone else took the gold.

This keeps happening. You're starting to wonder if sharing ideas at all is a mistake. If you should hoard them. If the game is rigged against people who think openly.

Why Claims Get Stolen

The brutal truth: ideas aren't property.

You can't own an insight. You can't fence off a concept. The moment you share an idea, it's in the wild. Anyone can use it, adapt it, build on it, claim it.

This isn't a legal problem (though sometimes it's that too). It's a structural problem. Ideas are non-rivalrous—your having an idea doesn't stop me from having it too. They're non-excludable—once shared, you can't unshare them.

In economic terms, ideas are public goods. And public goods get under-produced because the people who create them can't capture the value.

Your stolen claims aren't bad luck. They're the predictable outcome of playing by rules that don't favor idea-havers.

What Ownership Looks Like

You can't own ideas. But you can own things around ideas.

• Own the articulation. The idea might be common, but your specific way of explaining it can be distinctive. Develop a voice, a vocabulary, a frame that's recognizably yours.
• Own the application. Anyone can have the insight. But you can be the one who built the thing, ran the experiment, created the case study. Implementation is ownable in ways that insight isn't.
• Own the context. Be so visibly associated with an idea that using it without crediting you looks like theft. This is reputation, not property—but it works.
• Own the next idea. If you're always one step ahead, it doesn't matter that people take your old ideas. You've already moved on. They're mining your tailings.

The Stolen Claim becomes less painful when you stop trying to own what can't be owned and start building on terrain that's defensible.