You also need to build excitement and momentum for the idea. Most million dollar ideas aren't doable by 1 man in a reasonable amount of time. You need to inspire others so that you can get people who want to work with you to and others that have money to invest. Not many people want to steal an idea and run, most want to be part of it and the best way to succeed is as a team.

That said, there are certainly some jerks who would want to steal the idea and you probably don't want be associating with those people anyways.

I just assumed that a translation of code into another language would constitute a derivative work. Much like translation of Harry Potter into German would be protected by the original copyright. On the other hand, my biggest problem with this kind of protection entering copyright is the absurd length of time that it lasts.

In general, I agree with this sentiment: a clever, elegant, non-obvious way to transform data should have some protections. However, I imagine that copyright law would provide enough. A short amount of code only has so many unique representations (assuming we define the same logic in java and perl to be 1 representation). Since most of these will be effectively identical, the inventor ideally has some good protection right there. When someone creates a new and hopefully better way to perform the same task, then that code should be separate with its own protection. It ends up being a balanced way to protect things since it encourages algorithmic innovation and makes it really difficult to protect something that has a dozen different ways of being implemented (like a one-click patent). The downside is that it requires access to competitors source code in court and various methods for deconstructing any language to its logic for comparison purposes.