How to protect an idea from being stolen and reverse engineered by its more funded company?

Question

Copyright

How do companies like twitch and instagram get promoted?
I don’t know what their budget was, but I’m 200% sure that 99% of small companies put pressure on larger ones simply by copying the functionality better than in the original. If it doesn’t work out, they stupidly buy it using any methods.

The question is what to do with it and how to defend yourself?

Personally, I do nothing but such reasons as

• chance of failure is high
  
• difficult to copy in a short time
  
• too costly to copy, payback longer or not known at all
  

because of which large companies may refuse to copy do not see.

If so, how then to complicate the copying of the idea? I believe this is the only thing that can be more or less influenced.
And what about promotion, if you occupy a niche, it essentially complicates the theft of ideas. You will still need to pull the audience.
The fastest possible promotion is one of the methods of protecting an idea, it makes it more stable, but this may not be enough.

How do companies monitor what to rub? After all, they learn about smaller features and ideas, which means that they are already more or less promoted and, apparently, this is often not enough.

Answer 1

Do not worry about this, the giant will not be able to implement the idea at the same detailed level as a small team (for example, compare whatsapp and telegram)
This is due to the fact that the larger the company, the more diverse forces begin to influence its behavior and the more difficult it is to manage it qualitatively (this is the so-called problem of scale)
For example:
due to the scale, whatsapp (as a division of facebook) must not store data confidentially, since a company as large as facebook (comparable in income to the GDP of some countries) is undoubtedly located under the supervision of the secret services, and must comply with their requests in order to maintain friendly relations, in addition, the disclosure of data synergizes perfectly with the marketing business of facebook
telegram, due to its small nature, was able to build a more confidential messenger, however, as we see with an increase in scale, it has to comply with the requirements of other forces in order to maintain friendly relations, for example, apple was able to force telegram to remove channels that distribute copyrighted content, and apple was asked by the US government to follow up on this, and the US government was lobbied by copyright companies (but that's another story), the product that the company creates takes on a form that will satisfy the company, its consumer, the companies that are in cooperation, as well as an infinite number of other forces that will be interested in it, we can say that everything in the world that is connected with the product leaves its mark on it (to one degree or another)
Now consider what happens with the growth of the scale, it is known that the scale is fractal, imagine for simplicity that 90% of companies exist with a turnover of up to $10,000 out of the remaining 10% again, 90% exist with a turnover of 10 times more up to $100,000, and so on recursively .
Now consider the differences for a small and a large company:
1) A small company releasing a unique product can often find a sufficient number of customers, even though its product is very unique and unusual, and was created only taking into account the wishes of the owner, since for existence small company, it can find a huge number of other small and large companies to cooperate with.
2) A large company is often forced to cooperate mainly only with other comparable large companies, as well as to support a whole bunch of small companies that depend on it (such as bifidobacteria from yogurt advertising), so they cannot make a product without looking at a large number of participants in the process and because of this they cannot implement their ideas in the form in which they can be done by a small company, which very often leads to the fact that the product of small companies is more effective, since small companies are closer to objective reality than large ones, with on the other hand, large companies are able to engage in large-scale projects (such as the development of quantum supercomputers or cloud artificial intelligence)
ps. I doubt that someone will read my text, but since YOU, the reader, have read right up to here, I say thank you and take off my hat :)

Answer 2

An idea costs nothing. It is worth implementing an idea, and then only if the implementation brings income. Some ideas can be patented in some countries, but a patent is also not worth hoping for - a little refinement and now competitors are bypassing you with a new patent. The winner is the one who realizes his ideas the fastest.