Online Contracters & Idea Stealing?
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No, but then your idea is public the moment your product is public. You can patent the process is it's sufficiently novel, non-obvious and practical (at the moment, at least -- but be careful of existing patents). You can put non-disclosure agreements in place, and you can claim copyright on any work product from the project as part of the working contract/agreement. Fundamentally, though, non-patentable ideas by themselves are valueless -- it's the execution of that idea that carries value. If you can't execute the idea, then you have nothing.
In other words, your ideas are precisely as valuable as your investment, promotion and marketing make them, but only if they are manifested in a product. Those are the areas in which "technical founders" are traditionally weak -- they may be able to take your nascent idea and turn it into a product that is a thousand times better in every respect by seeing past your technical short-sightedness, but they rarely have the people chops or the business wherewithal to turn it into a commercial success by themselves. Trust me, those who are begging for nickels on a rent-a-geek site are not displaying much in the way of business acumen (or, from what I've seen, technical ability); and those who can afford to let you come to them already have a business model that exploits their talents to the limits they are willing to endure.
If you have nothing but an idea, then good luck. If you want to execute, and execute well, then you'll have to be willing to get married (in a sense). Or learn how to code.
In other words, your ideas are precisely as valuable as your investment, promotion and marketing make them, but only if they are manifested in a product. Those are the areas in which "technical founders" are traditionally weak -- they may be able to take your nascent idea and turn it into a product that is a thousand times better in every respect by seeing past your technical short-sightedness, but they rarely have the people chops or the business wherewithal to turn it into a commercial success by themselves. Trust me, those who are begging for nickels on a rent-a-geek site are not displaying much in the way of business acumen (or, from what I've seen, technical ability); and those who can afford to let you come to them already have a business model that exploits their talents to the limits they are willing to endure.
If you have nothing but an idea, then good luck. If you want to execute, and execute well, then you'll have to be willing to get married (in a sense). Or learn how to code.
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It's not that simple. Some jurisdictions make such contractual clauses null and void on their face unless "work for hire" conditions prevail -- and "work for hire" generally (although not universally) means tasks carried out in the normal course of employment. A contractor hired for a specific purpose does not normally meet the definition of "employee" for the purposes of "work for hire" law. The situation is further complicated by the fact that most online relationships of this sort involve at least two jurisdictions, so while you may be able to prevent actions by your contractor in, say, Nebraska, that wouldn't prevent him from operating in California or Romania. Even if you can get a judgement against the contractor in Jurisdiction A, that doesn't prevent him from operating in Jurisdiction B, and laws concerning what legally constitutes "operating in" a jurisdiction may keep you from enforcing the judgement in Jurisdiction A as well.
Again, the idea that your idea is valuable in and of itself is something to rid yourself of entirely. If you can execute, execute well, gain traction early, and remain a moving target by incrementally improving what you do, you have a winner -- and that's going to mean letting your technical person/people in on the game. If they have a vested interest in your success, they're not going to compete with you. If you want to do a "once and for all" job with hired labour and your idea is anything like good, you'll have your doors blown off quickly by people who've seen what you've done and can not merely copy it, but do it better.
It doesn't take much to copy most things -- any idiot can build a Facebook clone, and many idiots have. They didn't need any insider information. Persuading a half a billion people to move from Facebook to their app, though, is the hard part -- and the only reason that so many people are on Facebook is that there are so many people on Facebook. Facebook has always been that way -- everybody you knew was on Facebook. That's because they started with a small, closed community where everybody could know everybody through only a couple of degrees of separation (and you didn't have to be a user to have a profile at the beginning -- other people could make one for you). By the time everybody knew about Facebook, the community was large enough that migrating people off of it became the major problem.
The stuff that is hard to copy isn't a vague idea. Google got big because MapReduce and PageRank gave them a fundamentally better way to search the web. Monetizing that through advertising was an equally hard computing problem. An "idea guy" wouldn't have been able to pull it off at all, no matter how many CRUD-churning code monkeys he hired -- it took a pair like Sergey Brin and Larry Page to make it work. There were already a lot of big players in the search space, but the searches were so-so at best and the ads were almost always completely irrelevant. Getting the computing problem right made the difference (and still does).
The chances are pretty good that whatever idea you have, it's a lot closer to the Facebook end of the scale than it is to the Google end. If it's simple enough that you can hire somebody to build it to your specifications, it's simple enough for somebody else to copy at a glance, so don't worry about the guy you hire stealing your idea -- anybody else can do the same thing. If you want to win the game, then play, and don't stop playing. Build what you envision, get customers, listen to them and make it what they want/need it to be. That takes time, not a one-shot contracting deal. Give people a reason to join, and keep giving them a reason to stay. If you can't do that, then you've already lost.
Again, the idea that your idea is valuable in and of itself is something to rid yourself of entirely. If you can execute, execute well, gain traction early, and remain a moving target by incrementally improving what you do, you have a winner -- and that's going to mean letting your technical person/people in on the game. If they have a vested interest in your success, they're not going to compete with you. If you want to do a "once and for all" job with hired labour and your idea is anything like good, you'll have your doors blown off quickly by people who've seen what you've done and can not merely copy it, but do it better.
It doesn't take much to copy most things -- any idiot can build a Facebook clone, and many idiots have. They didn't need any insider information. Persuading a half a billion people to move from Facebook to their app, though, is the hard part -- and the only reason that so many people are on Facebook is that there are so many people on Facebook. Facebook has always been that way -- everybody you knew was on Facebook. That's because they started with a small, closed community where everybody could know everybody through only a couple of degrees of separation (and you didn't have to be a user to have a profile at the beginning -- other people could make one for you). By the time everybody knew about Facebook, the community was large enough that migrating people off of it became the major problem.
The stuff that is hard to copy isn't a vague idea. Google got big because MapReduce and PageRank gave them a fundamentally better way to search the web. Monetizing that through advertising was an equally hard computing problem. An "idea guy" wouldn't have been able to pull it off at all, no matter how many CRUD-churning code monkeys he hired -- it took a pair like Sergey Brin and Larry Page to make it work. There were already a lot of big players in the search space, but the searches were so-so at best and the ads were almost always completely irrelevant. Getting the computing problem right made the difference (and still does).
The chances are pretty good that whatever idea you have, it's a lot closer to the Facebook end of the scale than it is to the Google end. If it's simple enough that you can hire somebody to build it to your specifications, it's simple enough for somebody else to copy at a glance, so don't worry about the guy you hire stealing your idea -- anybody else can do the same thing. If you want to win the game, then play, and don't stop playing. Build what you envision, get customers, listen to them and make it what they want/need it to be. That takes time, not a one-shot contracting deal. Give people a reason to join, and keep giving them a reason to stay. If you can't do that, then you've already lost.
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That will make no difference unless you're dealing with something that is patentable (ideas are not -- there needs to be an implementation), is subject to copyright (ideas are not, completed code is -- but there is a question here as to who actually holds the copyright, since you are not legally the "employer" of your contractor, so copyright would have to be negotiated), a trade secret (anything that "shows" on the outside is not a secret) or is that is discussed under a legally-enforceable NDA (and, again, once you have disclosed, the agreement is meaningless).
If your website is your business, then it's going to mean a whole lot more than buying something and waiting for the bucks to roll in. The chances are pretty darned good that what you're imagining is close to being a good thing, but you won't even begin to know for sure until after you release. Very, very few web businesses get it right on the first try.
Again, your idea, while it is nothing but an idea, is worthless. Stop worrying, and learn to love the bomb. The only way forward is to execute, and to keep executing so you can stay ahead of the curve. If your idea is worth copying, it will be copied; don't worry about who's going to do the copying -- just make sure that they can't catch up and pass you. If your idea is so simple that you can hire a contractor to do it once and for all, then somebody else will see what you're doing, find a way to improve upon it, and blow your doors off. And if you want to make sure that your developer is feeding his ideas back into your project, then you'd better be prepared to make it his project as well.
Try hanging out around the startup community for a while to get a feel for what the real world looks like. Start with Y Combinator (and you may want to read Paul Graham's essays as well).
If your website is your business, then it's going to mean a whole lot more than buying something and waiting for the bucks to roll in. The chances are pretty darned good that what you're imagining is close to being a good thing, but you won't even begin to know for sure until after you release. Very, very few web businesses get it right on the first try.
Again, your idea, while it is nothing but an idea, is worthless. Stop worrying, and learn to love the bomb. The only way forward is to execute, and to keep executing so you can stay ahead of the curve. If your idea is worth copying, it will be copied; don't worry about who's going to do the copying -- just make sure that they can't catch up and pass you. If your idea is so simple that you can hire a contractor to do it once and for all, then somebody else will see what you're doing, find a way to improve upon it, and blow your doors off. And if you want to make sure that your developer is feeding his ideas back into your project, then you'd better be prepared to make it his project as well.
Try hanging out around the startup community for a while to get a feel for what the real world looks like. Start with Y Combinator (and you may want to read Paul Graham's essays as well).