When the thread started I had a funny feeling too. Especially when compensation and copyright questions came up. I made a post on another forum where I knew a couple of entertainment industry attorneys hung out and this is one of the replies:
... my business involves ideas for entertainment products and intellectual property law too.
You can't protect ideas alone in American law. There are four kinds of intellectual property protection: copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret. Copyrights protect a specific expression of an idea but not the idea itself. They protect the TEXT but not the underlying concepts.
Patents protect ideas that are intended to advance "science and the useful arts," i.e. the patent has to be for an idea about doing something. An idea for a chase scene can't be patented.
A trademark is just a name, logo, or slogan that you use in commerce; obviously it doesn't apply here.
A trade secret is something that you know how to do and you make real efforts to keep it secret -- details of the process are kept under lock and key, employees who know it sign non-disclosure agreements, etc. The recipe for Coca-Cola is a trade secret. This mostly comes up when employees leave to start a competing business and use your methods. Obviously that doesn't apply here either.
Posting a message does not necessarily put its text in the public domain -- the text itself is still copyrighted -- but it does make its content public. If you want to get paid for an idea, there's no way you should post it publicly.
My own industry does not pay for ideas, period. Everybody in the business has ideas all the time. What matters far, far more than a new idea is the ability to execute it well. A brilliant idea, badly executed, still results in a mediocre product. On the other hand, a mediocre idea, brilliantly executed, often produces a huge money-spinner. (cf. Four Weddings and a Funeral -- oldest idea in the world, well-executed). It's also very difficult to recognize a brilliant idea in advance for what it is.
In the case you describe, I wouldn't count on seeing a dime. If somebody does, very nice; the producers must be feeling generous. I'll leave it to Max to discuss how likely THAT is.
