Sometimes standing on someone else's shoulders makes it impossible to see something entirely new.
Apple recently filed a major civil lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that former Apple employees took confidential documents, unreleased product designs, engineering presentations, supplier information, and other trade secrets with them as they joined OpenAI's hardware team.
According to the complaint, Apple alleges that some recruits were encouraged to bring proprietary hardware and technical information into OpenAI's product development process.
OpenAI has denied the allegations.
The courts will determine what actually happened.
What interests me is a different question. It's not whether Apple ultimately wins the lawsuit. It''s not whether OpenAI loses. It's something much more fundamental:
Where does innovation come from?
Does it come from hiring talented people because of their experience and what they've learned over the years?
Does innovation begin to lose something when a new product starts with someone else's confidential work, rather than a blank page?
When does borrowing stop helping us to innovate, and begin to prevent us from discovering what we were capable of creating?
Hiring Experience vs. Hiring Someone Else's Work
Companies hire experienced people because of what they've learned.
They don’t not hire a mechanical engineer because that engineer knows how to build a specific product. They hire someone because they understand how to solve problems.
Industrial designers, software engineers, architects, and scientists accumulate decades of experience. That experience belongs to them.
Products, confidential documents, unreleased prototypes, and proprietary designs belong to the company that invested in creating them.
The difference seems obvious. Until you try to draw the line.
Where does experience end?
Where do trade secrets begin?
The boundary isn't always obvious, especially when years of experience become intertwined with the products someone helped to create.
The Blank Page
The lawsuit made me think about a decision I made years ago while designing the logo for Song Chef®.
I started by doing what seemed perfectly reasonable. I found a piece of clip art that was close to what I had in mind and built a logo around it. I liked it enough that I hired an attorney to help me trademark it.
At the last minute, I called my attorney and told him to stop. I told him to pause the process of submitting the trademark claim until he heard back from me.
Not because there was a legal problem.
Something didn't feel right.
It wasn't that I was worried about copyright. I was worried about something else. I didn't want someone else's creativity shaping my own.…
I realized that if I truly wanted to create something original, I couldn't begin by modifying someone else's work.
I thought about keeping a picture of a bird next to me as I sketched ideas. I rejected that too. I didn't want another image or drawing, even as a reference, to influence what I was creating.
So I closed everything.
I opened Adobe Illustrator, a program I wasn't even proficient at using, and started with a blank file.
No clip art.
No reference images.
Just the idea in my head.
I didn't even have a drawing tablet or pen. Everything had to be built from simple geometric shapes—circles, straight lines, and curves.
It was slow at first.
Then something unexpected happened.
Those limitations forced me to solve each design problem instead of borrowing someone else's solution.
The Song Chef® character that emerged wasn't something I could have found by searching clip art or modifying an existing design. It became its own character, with its own personality. Later, a professional artist commented on the composition, framing, balance, and color choices using technical terms I didn't understand.
Ironically, I didn't create the logo because I was trying to make great art.
I created it because I wanted to know what would happen if I stopped borrowing ideas and trusted my own imagination.
Building on Experience vs. Building on Someone Else's Design
That experience is what came to mind when I read Apple's lawsuit against OpenAI.
Reading Apple's lawsuit made me wonder what might have happened if the team had embraced similar creative constraints. Instead of beginning with existing designs, what if they had started with nothing but their own experience and a blank page? Money wasn't the limitation. Perhaps the real challenge would have been giving themselves permission to begin from scratch.
If the allegations are true, I can't help wondering what OpenAI’s team might have created had they begun the same way—with nothing more than their own experience, their own ideas, and a blank page.
Would the final product still have been good if they started with Apple's confidential designs?
Perhaps.
That's not the question I find most interesting.
The question I keep coming back to is this:
Would it have been even better if they hadn't?
We'll never know.
The Problem the Lawsuit Solves
Most discussions focus on whether Apple wins or OpenAI loses. To me, that's one problem.
The lawsuit may resolve questions of ownership, accountability, compensation, and whether confidential information was improperly taken or used.
Those are important questions.
It doesn't answer other questions.
Could Apple have done anything differently to make its most talented people want to stay?
Can any company?
Based on public reporting, Apple may not have realized Tang was leaving to work for a direct competitor until after his departure, leaving Apple little opportunity to respond.
That doesn't mean Apple could have retained him.
It does raise a broader question for every company:
How do you build an environment where your most creative people don't want to leave?
The Problem It May Create
There's another question.
If companies cannot protect years of investment, innovation becomes harder as organizations become reluctant to invest in creating new ideas.
On the other hand, if knowledge becomes too restricted, talented people may become less willing or able to move between companies, slowing the exchange of ideas that drives technological progress.
Finding the right balance is difficult.
Consumers depend on both.
We want companies to invest billions creating something genuinely new. We benefit when talented people carry their knowledge forward into future innovations.
What Makes Something Original?
Perhaps the question isn’t where experience ends and trade secrets begin. Perhaps the deeper question is where innovation begins. Does it begin by borrowing from what already exists?
Or does it begin with a blank page?
Looking back, I'm grateful I stopped myself before taking the easy path. The first logo was good enough to trademark. The second required starting over with a blank page. It produced a design that was unmistakably my own.
This article isn't really about intellectual property law. It's about a question every creative person, engineer, designer, and entrepreneur faces:
When does borrowing stop helping us innovate, and start preventing us from discovering what we're capable of creating ourselves?
Perhaps Apple's lawsuit will determine who owns yesterday's ideas. The courts are the right place to answer that question.
The question I'm left with is a different one.
How much of tomorrow's innovation depends on having the courage to begin with a blank page?
We'll never know what OpenAI's hardware team might have created had they started with nothing more than their own experience and imagination.
I know what happened when I closed the clip-art window and opened a blank file instead.
That's when I gave myself the opportunity to create something that had never existed before.