Anything you can do, I can do better

Another week, and more news about social networking behemoth Facebook, which, it turns out, may be very close to a settlement with the unfortunately-named Winklevoss brothers, the founders of rival site ConnectU, who claim Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea during the group's Harvard days.

The brothers claim Zuckerberg stole the code while he was employed by them to create dating site Harvard Connection. If their claim is true, the Winklevoss brothers must be very bitter: With 70m users, Facebook is currently the fifth-most trafficked website on the internet, as well as the third-fastest growing, with around 65bn page views per month.

Unfortunately for the Winklevosses, theft is a fact of business. Come up with a good idea, and someone else will invariably come up with a better way of doing the same thing.

Just look at the number of pages that sprang up when milliondollarhomepage hit the headlines in 2006 – there were hundreds of copycats, many claiming to be endorsed by Alex Tew, the 21-year-old who founded the original site.

Even po-faced Dragon Deborah Meaden agrees  unique ideas aren’t important. She was on BBC breakfast yesterday, encouraging more women to become entrepreneurs. Her message was clear: Ladies, if you don't have confidence in your own idea, it doesn't matter – just copy someone else's and make it better.

I interviewed BeatThatQuote.com founder John Paleomylites this week, who wholeheartedly embraces improving other people’s ideas.

He's a formidable force and can be intimidating to interview, but when I timidly suggested that he may have taken some inspiration from MoneySupermarket.com, he laughed.  “Oh, no! The business model was entirely, entirely copied. Shamelessly copied,” he said.

They say copying is the sincerest form of flattery, but in business, it's more of an expression of  ‘Anything you can do, I can do better'.

As John Paleomylites put it: “It’s a lot easier to make money from an unoriginal idea than it is an original idea. If you're selling a product the market has already accepted, there’s no risk. It's a hundred times easier.”