What a crock. It was launched on Prime Time last night by Aileen O’Toole, co-founder of The Sunday Business Post.
In submitting an idea you also agree to its publication in any form by The Ideas Campaign. By submitting the idea you are thereby granting The Ideas Campaign the perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, copy, modify, edit, translate, publish, display, post, transmit, distribute or part company with your submitted idea without any compensation to you, anonymously or in the aggregate, for internal or external purposes, alone or as part of other works in any form, media or technology.
The Ideas Campaign reserves the right without notice and for any reason not to respond to or use ideas or comments submitted to The Ideas Campaign. Visitors who do not give accurate email addresses or complete the relevant forms fully will not have submissions considered.
So you setup a website to get ideas from the public. And by so doing, the public loses any right to profit from their ideas, and hands them over to the website they submitted the idea to.
Eh, no.
Comments
13 responses to “Ideas Campaign”
Value Ireland has a similar take and I just posted this comment over there, so I’m being lazy and copy and pasting here:
I think it’s a good idea and fully behind anything that tries to do something positive. I have a few ideas myself and will be blogging about them. If the terms and conditions were removed from the site and everything went public from the get go – would you still have an issue with the idea?
Seems to me that the t&c’s would have to be there to prevent someone down the line sueing the state for a share of (for example) some cost savings or revenue raising measure that came about from the ideas. e.g. let’s take the George Lee 1c tax on texts. Supposing this idea was submitted through the site by Johnny Doe and there were no terms and conditions. After a year, the tax raises x million in revenue. Johnny Doe decides – hey this was my idea – I want payback. he takes a court case – judge rules that he didn’t give explicit permission to use his idea – therefore state must pay him for his idea. That’s why i think the terms and conditions are there.
I suppose the question is, is it the State or the company behind the website that benefits?
I’ve been through the whole site and can see only genuine intention behind it – I don’t see any company or individual is going to benefit personally from any ideas submitted – I really don’t.
But, what I do now see is that the campaign needs to give a plain english statement on their blog as to why the terms and conditions are necessary because by the middle of next week the t’s and c’s will be story and not the campaign – which saddens me.
As le craic mentions, I’m with Gavin on this one. I do wonder who now is behind it all.
They very quickly dropped trying to pretend that it was just Aileen herself behind the site – instead now going for the full “campaign” terminology.
So, either Amas are out to make money for themselves on the press coverage they might be getting (but you’d wonder how) or they’re running this campaign for someone else.
Given their vast array of government contracts, I wonder is it a government party behind it. Given the unusual step that FG took in 2003 to set up a website to address “rip off Ireland” (but don’t get me started on that one!), maybe FF or the GP are trying the website option this time around to get us out of the recession?
If you put your idea on your blog, you’ve just opened it up to the public anyway. Ideas aren’t copyrightable or patentable (implementations are).
If you have an amazing business idea, and you don’t want to share it; then don’t. Make it a business.
If you have a community idea or an idea which works at a governmental level; well get this idea in front of a lobby group who could force the change at some level.
I’m with Will on this – but I think they need to clarify why the need for the terms and conditions – so that it doesn’t become the story.
have can you say anything other then this is self promotion for the pr company le craic?
sw – I’ve just posted on Value Ireland that the terms and conditions are bothering me now that I’ve thought more about it – and also believe all ideas submitted through the website should be made public to keep it all transparent. I have plenty to say – and have a few ideas I want to submit and will publish on my blog as well.
As for the question about self promotion for the pr company involved – tbh – without my now scrolling up to look at the name, I don’t even recall the name of the pr company – and doubt that many others will either. And so what anyway, they get a bit of pr, they set up the website – what crime have they commited by doing that?
PR company with many links to the government launches a campaign which is all about “positivity” (that is, let’s not criticize anyone who got us into this mess, kids).
Good article here:
http://theirishbulletin.blogspot.com/2009/03/ideas-schmideas.html
P.
As mentioned above, If you’re idea is worth submitting then it’s worth implementing. However, given the current climate where’s the money going to come from?
the problem is le craic that all thats going to come of it, self promotion for the company
I’m very suspicious of this – I looked at the ‘batches’ of the ideas that have made it past the mysterious man-behind-the-curtain filter and not one single one (out of 1,200) advocates reforming the public sector or seriously reducing expenditure. Who has editorial control of this?
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