Copyright an idea (Frank Boyd)

[angelxmoreno]

I have a simple idea for a small internet business that I am already developing. It just hit me that anyone can just copy what I am doing and invest 30x more money and completely take over. How do I protect myself from this?

[jdoc]

Unless you have invented a process which is patentable (which I'm guessing is not the case since you're saying that anyone can copy it), then you can't. But if anyone can copy it, where's the value? Why do it?

You need to ask yourself what you can do to ensure that customers come to you and stay with you. Ask yourself what it takes to get the customer and then why they would want to stay once they've started to use your product/service (I'm being general here since I have no idea what your proposed business is). Despite 'anyone' being able to put up something like myspace or flickr, most people stick with these services once they've started using it for (among other reasons) the fact that they don't want to have to move all their stuff from one place to another.

How many customers do you need to get going? If you can gain those customers without widespread advertising, then you can probably stay off the radar screens of most people until you feel like you can comfortably increase your customer base, at which point having some competition doesn't devastate you.