Last week, Time and Rolling Stone wound up on a collision course.

Why?

Because Time published a Rolling Stone article on their website – before Rolling Stone even published it themselves.

Here’s how it went. Monday afternoon, The Rolling Stone excitedly announced that they had a great piece about General McChrystal’s Obama critique (you know the rest, it got him fired), and they sent a copy of the article to the Associated Press (organizer of news syndication). Come Tuesday morning, it was published in its entirety on time.com.

It’s such a beautiful illustration of how things work in the world of any:

1. The very microsecond you do something, anyone, anywhere can do the same thing. You can only be unique at the exact moment (or rather, before) the release.
2. The logic becomes – as soon as a product exists, it’s anyone’s property. Thus, Time’s argument was – if Rolling Stone did not publish the article immediately, it was up for grabs. As the 2,920 times more impatient inhabitants of the world of any want things immediately, the article would have lost it’s value before Rolling Stone got to publishing it anyhow.

Right or wrong? You tell me.