Ah. We academics are sticklers about novelty and we try and pin down what is and isn't. We also maintain the conceit that most of our published ideas are. As far as most of us are concerned, our ideas are probably novel unless published elsewhere. These types of things are notable exceptions.

Which reminds me of a conversation I was having the other day which noted that there's not much fear of the NSA scooping you as a researcher because they don't really like publishing things they find useful. :)

It's just our weird and somewhat arrogant perspective, I think. :)