Just recently I've been bumping into a related form of parasitic adoptionism, with a few stories about consultants (from large and supposedly respected consulting firms) hopping around on the beady-eyed lookout for good slide decks containing frameworks and approaches and recommendations from bright employees among their clients, sucking them in and working them over, re-presenting them back to the client's management team as their own work and their own IP. This obviously happens a lot, because there's a fairly common saying in Singapore that a consultant is somebody who asks to borrow your watch so that they can tell you the time. I used to think it was a joke.

There's a thing about unscrupulous idea theft and "ownership" claims among a certain type of consultant so it's not just about stories. Story theft can masquerade as research I suppose, except that any bona fide research project would have permission built into future use - maybe we need to ask to see such permissions (and the authoring history of masterful slide decks) before crediting them? A compulsory provenance and permission statement?

Just to depress you Patrick. When I first became a consultant back in the 1980's a wise old bird took me aside and gave me his secret for success. Find the bright young thing in the organisation who everyone is ignoring. Get their solution out, then dress it up in management jargon and present it back to the management after you have maximised your billings. If said bright young thing might make trouble, engagement them in a job interview process to shut them up. You don't need to employ them, just get them to think that you might. With regret it is as old as the hills and no less wrong in consequence.

I hope I have never stooped to that, but I have come across it too many times.

Dave, how would the IP claim made by those XXX look like? I don't know much about IP and patents etc., but what I know is that it does not relly help if you only have it, you must also be able to enforce it as well, otherwise it's just a lazy claim (which might still frighten people and thus make the world a worse place).

Hi Dave,
I know that years ago the KPN (then under a different name, I think it was PTT Telecom) tried to claim ownership of a colour (a nasty type of green they used in all their advertising). Their claim was the colour in the context of advertising in their category but the colour as such. There was a large debate. However, they lost the case, the court judged that not anyone can claim a colour.

This is not a consultant-only issue. Organizations do that to their employee's stories. Colleges sports teams do that to the stories of their athletes to raise money (recent story in our paper, the Seattle Times, about how the sports department puffed up stories about athletes lives that were pure romanticized stuff that in the end covered up serious problems in the young people's lives and cost everyone a lot.)

In international development it is done every day in the name of "telling people's stories" to raise money.

It comes up in online forums when long time posters want to remove their words when they leave and their removed chops away some of the community's story. (see http://emekaeme.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/author-vs-community-ii-hostage-taking-and-reaction/)

What about companies whose entire business model is to get people to post their knowledge and then the company "owns" it and resells it?

It is beyond an IP issue - more of the stealing souls level you started your post with.

Where is the line? What is the appropriate disclosure of selling or worse, reappropriating someone else's story? When is it just the natural consequence of our intersections and natural inclination to use story as a way to carry our ideas and understanding and when is it opportunistic rip-off? To me, that's why we need ethics and clarity on our ethical practices. But the stories themselves seduce us, eh?