I have first hand experience of this at my last company (as an employee). Several big name companies were sniffing around and the CEO took the initiative to actually explain in detail what we were doing and how we did it.

Not one of the companies actually became a competitor even though they had the financial resources to crush us. In fact, one ended up purchasing us!

The idea truly is nothing.

YouTube solved a difficult problem. How to let people share videos easily. I can't imagine that converting multiple video formats to Flash Video was an easy problem to solve, either.

Plus, their name is subversively brilliant.

I would like to have a black t-shirt with this phrase, and use it on every Anything-camp event out there.

It would be really ironic if none of us printed said shirt.

That's a great idea.

That's why you can't copyright ideas.