The obvious fix for this is to either eliminate trade secret protections in favor of patents, or make them conditioned upon escrow with the government to be released to the public domain after some time (perhaps half the time of a patent).

Don't want to release your recipe ever? Tough cookies when your lead scientists bring it to a competitor.

Trade secrets are counter to the purpose of "IP" law. The public has no interest in protecting them and every interest in... not doing that.

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carlosjobim 3 days ago | parent [-]

Until every new born child is forcefully implanted with a microchip in their brain at birth, you will never be able to stop people from thinking and having secrets.

If people are not fairly compensated for sharing their secrets and discoveries with the public, they won't do it. They'll take it to the grave if so be. And we loose out on information which can benefit an enormous amount of people.

So the quoted person is absolutely right that there is a great tension between these two factors. How should great ideas be greatly compensated while giving the widest access possible? Neither piracy nor expensive access to information is the right solution.

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ndriscoll 3 days ago | parent [-]

Trade secrets never expire and sharing them is a crime, so currently people can take them to their grave and the government will have their backs in doing so. A single person's secret is also unlikely to matter much next to the potential of global corporations' secrets, and the nature of corporations is that they are made of people who have little reason not to take an offer with a competitor after they've learned the necessary secrets to do their job. Hence, don't protect those corporations unless they offer something in return (explicitly divulging them/contributing to the common knowledgebase). Without that protection, knowledge can more naturally spread.

The fair compensation they should be offered is time limited protection. Otherwise it should simply be legal for any of their employees to spread that knowledge. Giving unlimited protection to not divulge knowledge is counter to the entire point of "IP" law.

"The" Coca-Cola formula would have lost its patent restrictions a century ago. It's still unshared. Why exactly should we continue to grant any legal protection from an employee sharing it?

	▲	carlosjobim 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We're way off topic, and it seems like this thread is just turning into unproductive argument. I'm just arguing that there will always be tension between information wanting to be free and information creators wanting to profit from their ideas or their work. We don't even have to involve companies and trade secrets in discussing that tension, it was just an example.