Legal Question in Business Law in Virginia

Unfortunately, this is a very difficult situation for any one in small business.

While there are ways to protect scientific inventions with patents and artistic or literary works with copyright, protecting pure business ideas is almost impossible.

Our system was originally based on the idea of free competition. While that has been weakened a great deal, the legal system (especially in Virginia) still reflects the idea of competitors working in the marketplace and let the best win. So business ideas cannot be easily restricted.

You can ask a business to sign a "non disclosure agreement" before you give them any ideas or proposals or busienss plans, and you should.

The trouble is that many companies will nto sign an NDA. They don't know that you have anything valuable to tell them. They won't sign the NDA until they believe you have somethign valuable to give them. But they don't b elieve that until afer you have given them the ideas. Now they will believe tha tyou have something valuable. But you have already given the ideas to them.

Maybe you can convince the company that you gave them good ideas before, so they should listen to your new ideas whcih you have not told them about yet.

Maybe you can show your letters to Bluegreen to other companies and take photographs of what Bluegreen is doing. Then you can show some other company "See, this was my idea. I think I have some new ideas for you." Maybe they will be willing to sign an NDA with you for new, future ideas.

Of course it is also possible that someone inside Bluegreen is telling his or her boss that these were THERE ideas. Maybe if you can talk to teh very top of Bluegreen and show where Bluegreen implemented your ideas, they would possibly (a) hire you for such work in the future, or to implement it better, or (b) maybe fire the person who stole your ideas for lying to hsi or her boss, saying that it was their idea.