I’m pleased to see that Patrick Ruffini also noticed Marco Arment’s post on Safari’s Reading List and how it will impact Instapaper. Arment’s take on this development inspired Ruffini to articulate his views on the role of copying in driving innovation:

In the physical world, we have erected elaborate barriers to prevent copying at all costs (copyright laws, patents, etc.) because rampant stealing of product designs would deter the investment necessary to create them. But it works the opposite way in the technology world. The threat of someone — particularly an Apple — ripping off your idea only forces you to get better and drives innovation forward.
In the tech world, every company copies every other company and this is rarely grounds for a lawsuit. Facebook blatantly ripped off Twitter for a while. Google Buzz also took on Twitter. Facebook Places was supposed to spell the death of Foursquare. Remember iTunes Ping, the Facebook for music?
Rarely does a technology behemoth move into a space occupied by small, smart, and focused team working on a single idea, and win.
There’s a rule in technology that to disrupt an incumbent, your product doesn’t have to just be better. It needs to be dramatically (like 10 times) better. The switching costs are too high for people to switch away to something that’s only slightly better.
Competition from big players forces smaller players to refine their product and fight for the loyalty of their customers.
And because the barriers to entry in designing a web app are so low, and the product cycle so fast, the threat of your innovation instantly becoming commoditized — rather than deterring invention, can actually spur the next wave of innovation by forcing you to move onto the next idea. Oftentimes, this idea is located in what science author Steven Johnson calls the “adjacent possible” — the place where a slight tweak to an existing idea fuels the most meaningful innovations.

I had a conversation last night with an entrepreneur who has identified a potential niche in the world of flash sales, and he’s one of many I meet in a New York, or rather a stratum of New York, that seems considerably more entrepreneurial now than it did pre-crisis. He’s facing a number of competitors who are trying to break into the same market, yet he’s convinced that he can out-hustle and out-execute them. Copying the basic idea won’t get you very far, as Ruffini goes on to argue.

But its continued threat is a catalyst for keeping entrepreneurs on their toes and the Internet constantly churning with different players and new models.

That is one reason why the copyright-free fashion industry is so innovative, and why advocates of fashion copyright are profoundly foolish.