Pa Arbor. A Pinoy colloquial term for borrowing without returning. "pa arbor naman nyang jacket. pa arbor naman niyang bolpen. pa arbor naman niyang bag" In some societies, this is something that is not to be tolerated. By de jure, it is stealing. The law does not permit someone to just get the property of a person, even if it is his friend. By de facto, we can cite gifts as an example of things we give or receive from a person (not buy or sell). But when we are talking about "pa arbor", one intrinsic feature it posses is that the person does NOT give it. He is forced to give it because his friend or someone asked him for that thing. It is a phenomenon that distorts the normal process of buy-sell or give-take. The person may not want to give it to you, but due to social pressure applied by the one asking the "pa arbor", you are forced to give it. And for us Filipinos, this is normal. We do not ask people to give that thing as a present (like Americans and Western Europeans do), we ask if we can "arbor" that thing. Plain and simple.
The human society, for thousands of years, tried to protect their rights. Right to life, right to everything and anything. One of the more profound, interesting, and controversial one is about Copyrights. Intellectual rights. Patents. The right that protects a persons idea or property. And true enough, through time, people created counter measures to protect their ideas from others, claiming their idea is 'original' and that no one should claim it. Patent offices. Copyright laws. Intellectual rights law. And of course the concept of plagiarism. For me, these things forced the people to be innovative in their field and to try things that are not "in-textbook" or are unusual to a commoners eye. But the thing is, we failed to realize that most of the things we see and we use are shameless ripoffs of an 'original' concept. In Yakitate! Japan (an anime), Kai (one of the sub characters) asked his sword master why he can't make a good enough bread to beat Azuma (the protagonist) The sensei replied in rhetoric: Azuma didn't create bread out of nothing. He used the concepts that is around him and made it his own. Even the greatest geniuses did shameless ripoffs of their greatest innovation. The thing is, in order to create innovation, you must base it with something practical, pragmatic, and feasible. An idea can be shaped, chopped, diced in a thousand times. All you have to do is get a piece and claim it as your own.
Is it bad to 'steal' an idea? Not really. Maybe a yes and a no. An idea that is stolen and is presented as it is is classified as stealing. Without innovations nor changes, it is merely piracy of an idea. However. An idea that shaped, personalized and evolved is not the same idea in comparison to its original state. When someone tries to manipulate a thing out of its original state and morph it into something he can call his own, to that I do not consider it stealing. It is merely innovating something passe. Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs did not steal nor pirate an idea from each other or from IBM or any third party. They simply "arbor-ed" it.
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