Can't this be used to make a clean room implementation? Have someone write a spec then someone else who is unrelated, implement it from scratch?

"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?"

Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.

	▲	ndriscoll an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Wouldn't B's publication of the information make it by definition no longer a trade secret? It is now public knowledge, regardless of whether the current or former engineers might be liable for the original leak. Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have essentially infinite protection/NDAs apply to all of humanity.
	▲	alightsoul an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own? There are countries in the global south that never had an industrial revolution and don't speak English and never had factories for export nor made anything in a factory industrially that isn't building material and food and maybe fuel for local consumption so they've never had an IP infringement case