Are your ideas safe?

I personally haven't been in this situation but I have read about parallels in the writing 'industry'.

One of the biggest problems is being able to prove that the ideas were indeed stolen. It is possible, when designing proposals that meet predefined specs, to come up with things that are quite similar.

Of course, if diagrams, tables and blocks of text are identical or extremely similar in the competitor's RFP, then that possibility becomes strained.

What you can do about it legally will depend upon what type of non-disclosure notices and copyright info you had on the RFP.

Especially in Network Infrastructure where someone "leaks" a proposal to a competing group that they either hope gets the contract or to outright pit them against each other in pricing.

I recently did a bid on a job for a business that a friend of mine asked as a personal favor and the business took my recommendations out on the internet and bought all the recommended parts themselves and now can't get it to work. Yesterday they asked to hire me to sort it out. I gave them my highest rate-(originally I gave them my "Friends" rate) -higher than the labor portion of my bid. They then couldn't understand how it would cost them more now...

Oh Well, maybe they'll opt for some inexpensive tweaker to do it and I'll even make more :)

Unfortunately, as Generalist has stated eloquently, it's not always easy to prove it.

Additionally, I'm not sure they did anything that could be construed as illegal, and even if they did it wouldn't be worth it to me to fight. If it was a bigger project I really wanted, I wouldn't include much of the specifics at all - only the outcomes. :)