Aside from genius mythoses the question "Who should own ideas?" pretty much depends on our opinions to the answer to the question "Where do ideas come from?". And honestly for many person this touches a religious underlying level, but something people would hardly ever raise as explicit topic in such a discussion. I see in principle 2 conflicting opinions where ideas come from:
* The human as processor, altough pretty advanced and a bit chaotic and with surprising results... Thats the approach mentioned above. Okay some humans might have a bigger "processing power" than others, its still input in, output out.
* The other big opinion is, how to say it?, kind of god acting through man. Human mind is considred to be something from another world, that acts through human bodies. Just look at Sistine Capel for a famous painting dipicting this widespread opinion. God touch the man with his finger. The man has an idea / has "inspriation".
I had for example an interesting discussion with somebody who was certain that souls are the source of ideas. And the concept of infinity in math a definitive proof of this. Since nothing in reality is infinite, there would no possiblity of humans thinking about infinity, when they hidden inner core didn't come from an infinite source of another world. I disagree, as the falacy in this logic is that a given system cannot come out with a "higher" output than the input given into it. This is wrong. Systems can organize things to get a higher output than input given, just look for example at freezing crystal liquids. A chaotic loworder liquid crystalizes to beatiful and complicated crystals.
Interesting is the physics example mentioned above. And yes, the way we treat famous people greatly differs from discipline to discipline. Physics is at a quite extrem side of this scale, as in physics famous people "just had ideas" discovered things. After that nobody cares about their lifesytle, their parentage, their reasons why they where intersted in physics, why they decided to work with especially this field within physics and not another and so on, what they hoped for their work would achieve. This generally considered unimportant. And it is also this technique in our world we usually we resect this situations of emergence of new ideas, they seem to be so genius in the retrospect. Bruno Latour wrote in "Laboratory Life" - "The microprocessing of facts" example of his studies how an idea came into the making, how it developed with a lot of baby steps, and especially how it was depicted a few years later. Short story, a scientist discovered that selene was responsible for a production of a specific proteine. (I bed for leniency if I depcit the biochemist details not 100% right, its not my field). The public depictation of this discovery was "Someday I (the genius) had the idea selene could be responsible for..." which looks like quite a genius idea, nobody would think of. The whole story was: He had discovered some other effect in his laboratory a few months ago. And the most terrible thing happened, what can happen to a natural scientist. His experiment did not work everywhere, many other laboratories reported it did not work, altough some others could see the same effects. A miserable situation. One day this scientist sits in a student course, and a student presents her master thesis, in where she proofs that selene is responsible for cancer. And in the U.S. the concentration of selene in the drinking water is proportional to some sorts of cancer. She had a map of the U.S. where this sorts of cancer appear in a higher density. The scientist notices that this map looks quite the same as the one where is experiments work and where it doesnt. So it must be the selene in the used drinking water responsible for that effect, not what the experiment claimed at first. So in the long story, the little steps don't look that ingenious anymore. Only when it doesn't happen by science that a social scientist is in place to take notes of the whole process, the whole story would not be known anymore, and for all of us it would just be "One day X had the idea that..." (and the implicit message would be, one day X was touched by the holy ghost and had an ingenius idea)... as it usual.
In other sciences like sociology, philosophy and economic theory (beyond neoclassics) famous thinkers must be treated quite different. You cannot really understand their theories without taking in account who said it. So usually you ask, who was it? In which epoche did this appear? In what social position was the person? What has he seen in his life that might be of importance? Who was he/she a scholar of? And so on. And if you are at pains to do think of all this, no single theory or statements comes in a great surprise. Of course it were often very special circumstances, that allowed somebody to view something differently than usual. And the circumstance may not make it certain that a person really thinks of something, like someone else this would just go by, chances are there.
Take for example the life of Karl Marx, a german guy, filled with the idealism theories of that time, then travelling to London and seing the arising industrialism in his worst epoche, and the suffering of the workers. Somebody grown up in London might have been "used to" that, but somebody coming from a yet unindustrialised nation this must have been a shock. No surprise he concentrated on economic theories and how to make the life of the worker better (that his theories didn't work is another story).
Or take Kant, you really understand his approaches much better if you take in account what for strong kind of Obsessive-compulsive disorder this man most likely had. There are famous quotes. That doesn't yet make this writing invalid, but you can retrace some passges more easily if taking that in account.
Or take Descartes as example. This person lifed so seclusive, that he refrained even to convers orally with anybody. He just wrote letters to a few friends, and only very few knew where he lifed (hid from the society) at time. A person lifng so alone, so seclusive, quite self centered in his world, the famous sentence, "i think therefor i am" don't come in surprise in this situation, don't they?
I'm still assured some people will abide by the impression that ideas/insperation come from another supreme instance, be it god, angels, the holy ghost, the soul or general genius, which must be left to be unexplainable. I personally just doubt it.
Just a logic fallacy, say we consider ideas not to be processed output of given input to a human, but to come from elsewhere. Why should somebody own something, when it was god that touched him by having an idea?
