Great Artists Steal

I'm just finishing up the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Issacson. There are a lot of items I could post about it, but one thing that stood out to me, and to a lot of others, was the apparent hypoocracy that Jobs had regarding stealing intellectual property.

Steve Jobs had a fit about Microsoft stealing the GUI, Android stealing MultiTouch and Dreamworks stealing the idea about CGI insects. But Jobs was also quoted as saying "Picaso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." This was referenced in the section regarding the "heist" of the GUI from Xerox PARC.

I think I can understand where Jobs could make a distinction in his own mind between his stealing and others stealing. In his case, he saw what others were doing, took those ideas, nad made them better. He saw other taking his ideas, and either making cheaper crap (he would have used a different word) or else simply marketing it without improving on it.

The Macintosh GUI was vastly improved over the Xerox one: Smooth rolling mouse, overlapping windows, drag and drop interface. After seeing the Xerox Star, said "We were very relieved... We knew they hand't done it right, and that we could, at a fraction of the price.

The Macintosh (or Lisa) wasn't the first GUI based PC (Xerox Alto or Star), the iPod wasn't the first hard drive based MP3 player (Compaq designed Hango/Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox PJB-100), the iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen smart phone (probably the IBM Simon 15 years earlier), the iPad wasn't the first tablet (they had been out for decades). In all those cases, one could make a credible claim that Apple was stealing someone elses ideas.

But if my idea is better than your idea, can you say that I stole your idea? I suppose that's the distinction that Steve Jobs might have been making.