Slashdot Mirror
Why Legal Experts Are Up In Arms Over a Trade-Secrets Bill Microsoft Loves (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers heard arguments over the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015. The proposed legislation would allow companies to pursue trade-secrets cases in federal court much as they can copyright or patent cases, thereby freeing them from the state-level constraints of today's laws. It also allows for so-called ex parte seizure, enabling a company that thinks a secret has been stolen to ask the government to seize a suspected thief's property without notice, to prevent misuse of that secret. It's the ex parte seizure provision, as well as the bill's potential to increase the duration and cost of trade-secrets litigation, that prompted more than 40 law professors to write a joint letter expressing their concern. Companies have long protected algorithms such as consumer credit-scoring mechanisms under trade-secret law, intellectual property expert and Hamline University professor Sharon Sandeen said in an interview after the hearing. If passed, the new bill could give them new powers to conceal those algorithms, she said. Voicing the opposing view, lawyers from Corning and DuPont cited the increasingly digital and global nature of trade-secrets theft, a sentiment that was echoed in a blog post by Jule Sigall, Microsoft's assistant general counsel of IP policy and strategy.
... the root of all evil.
The Secret Provisions that Microsoft Lawyers Don't Want You To Know
Take a Look at These Seven Trade Secrets Microsoft is Hiding From You
These Legal Experts Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity
Microsoft Angers Legal Experts With This One Weird Trick
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
...sounds to me like Microsoft is setting themselves up to become patent trolls to keep them afloat when their cash cows (Windows and Office) dry up.
As a general rule, nobody wants to be in state courts if they can help it. There are exceptions, and there are some good state courts, but you still would almost always rather be in federal court. If they could figure out a way to put all trade secrets cases in the commercial division in New York, for a counterexample of a good state court system, they might do it. But depending on the patchwork of inconsistent quality and law in state courts, if you're a big company in particular you'd rather just deal with federal courts.
Sorry, no mod points right now... but this one is freaking brilliant!
Microsoft Angers Legal Experts With This One Weird Trick
They will save the day! Expose their "secrets" so we all can laugh!
Still not getting why the government needs to intervene in the protection of trade secrets. That's why patents exist.
Wouldn't this help enforce GPL compliance?
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Trade secrets are a little different than patents or copyrights. A trade secret is something like the full list of KFC's original 11 herbs and spices, or the formula for transparent aluminum. To give an example of the difference between patents, copyright, and trade secrets, etc, let's consider Coca-cola:
The Coca-cola name and logo are trademarks.
If Coca-cola were to come up with a new method of putting carbonation in soft drinks, they might file a patent for that process.
If Coca-cola came up with song as an advertising jingle, they would own the copyright to that song.
And the (secret) formula for Coca-cola is a trade secret.
"... the administrator of all evil."
That's what this would be: Microsoft and companies like them being able to almost literally black-bag people, take everything they own, and leave them with no legal recourse and no rights, just on their say-so that their alleged trade secrets have been 'stolen'. Sure, no potential for massive abuse here, no sir-eee.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Patents are so inconvenient: limited lifetime, you have to publish how you're doing what you're doing. Much easier to just turn trade secrets into secret, infinite-life patents, now with government protection and a nice threat for any small companies that dare to try to compete with you.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
This COULD be a double edged sword.
Every tech person can form an LLC and self-incorporate.
They seize my laptop under trade secrets?
No problem. They do whatever and give it back.
I believe that they have retained copies of some of MY company data that was on that laptop, and is trade secret... Under the same law, seize their entire network until they can PROVE that they don't have any copies.
I mean, it IS fair. I am a very small company, and their court order seized MY company's entire network (the one laptop), so I should be able to seize theirs as well.
Long, long ago, in a land far, far away there were people that were very protective of their ideas. They'd go to great lengths to keep these ideas to themselves. Skilled workers were very protective of the processes they used to create their products. I recall reading of factories where the workers would never leave. They'd have effectively a castle built to house the workers and equipment. Food and raw material would enter and finished product would leave. As technology improved and society developed the concept of intellectual property was eventually born. In this way the people with the knowledge and skills would no longer have to be locked up to protect industrial processes.
This idea of intellectual property didn't end the practice of trade secrets but did provide an option to people that thought intellectual property laws were a better option than building a castle and trying to convince skilled craftsmen to lock themselves inside of it. The trade off was that the ideas that would otherwise be held a secret would be exposed to the government. The government would then give a time limited protection to the use of that idea so that the creator, and society, may profit from the idea. Any violations of this protection was therefore enforced by the government.
The problem with government enforced trade secrets is that the government does not know what they are protecting before there is a claim of a violation. The government would essentially have to rely on the claimant that the idea was actually their own to begin with. The accused would likewise have to show that they came up with the same idea independently, lawfully acquired the idea, or some other defense that would prevent prosecution.
In law and in theory the accused is innocent until proven guilty but in practice that does not always hold true.
I see so many ways that this could be abused. Unfortunately I cannot get the article to load, perhaps it's been slashdotted, so I don't know if the article spells out all the ways this law can be abused. We already have a very long history of legal protections of intellectual property, I see no need to change it now. If someone wishes to keep something a trade secret then they need to make sure no one else finds out through existing legal means. If someone wants legal protections of their intellectual property then they need to share that with a government body first, before it is revealed to anyone else, so that there is no question on who came up with the idea first. Without this prior revelation then there is always a reasonable doubt on who owns the property.
This bill should not become law, of only because any claim against it would be nearly impossible to prove in a court. As someone that has developed intellectual property for a living I believe I have a pretty strong understanding of how intellectual property laws benefit us all. I also understand the need to simply keep things to yourself if you want to keep something secret. For example, if I kept a crypto key (or a house key) in a obscure location then I can't be expected to have the government punish someone because they happened upon where I kept it. If that key enables someone to snoop around my electronic files (or my refrigerator) then there are laws against that. I can expect the government to protect my property to the extent that I made an effort to secure it, but if I don't secure my stuff then why should I expect the government to do that for me?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Historically the way to protect trade secrets was to look after your staff through providing excellent employment packages and instil in them a pride in the company they worked for.
One more blow for workers rights.
...to seize a suspected thief's property without notice, to prevent misuse of that secret.
Um, if it is a secret idea/algorithm/recipe/etc.... what good would it do to seize physical property? Are they going to grab every computer/laptop/thumbdrive/DVD/Backup drive/smartphone that belongs to a company in the hopes that they will get all copies of the stolen secret? Am I missing something here?
Briefly, a kid in Norway named Jon Johansen, along with other programmers in Germany, reverse-engineered the Xing DVD player, and published DeCSS, an independent implementation of the Contents Scrambling System (CSS) that was used on DVDs to deter unsanctioned copying, allowing Linux users for the first time to view DVDs on their computers. Subsequent research among crypto experts yielded more general solutions, and now CSS is effectively a no-op.
The DVD Copy Control Association -- DVD-CCA, the organization that licenses the creation of Hollywood-sanctioned DVD players -- tried to sue DeCSS out of existence in a California court. Their primary argument? That CSS was a trade secret that Johansen had improperly obtained and disclosed.
What was "improper" about it? His reverse-engineering violated the (*snicker*) "license agreement" attached to the Xing player.
Further, the DVD-CCA (incorrectly) argued, everyone who came in contact with DeCSS "knew or should have known" that CSS was a trade secret, and not to traffic in it, and asked the judge to put a restraining order on the Internet to prevent further distribution. (DVD-CCA also tried to argue that reverse-engineering is never proper or appropriate.)
Although the DVD-CCA's case was never resolved, CSS today is effectively useless as a copy protection mechanism, and DeCSS or its functional equivalent is widely available.
This legislation from Microsoft would appear to be an attempt to defend against such activity, and prevent people from ever inspecting or exercising control over their computers again.
Trade secrets are a weird edge case in intellectual property. They are not explicitly called out in the Constitution (as are copyrights and patents), but enjoy recognition in the courts. Unlike trademarks and patents, however, trade secrets do not need to be registered -- they exist solely by fiat (i.e. they exist because the company declares they exist). Trade secrets also do not have a formally defined "limited time" as Constitutionally required of copyrights and patents -- the inherent fragility of maintaining any kind of secret indirectly establishes the trade secret's limited lifetime.
Microsoft's proposal would greatly extend the reach and lifetime of trade secrets beyond their traditional scope.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
You know how three companies can keep a trade secret?
If two of them are bankrupt by the third.
Seriously, this makes me sad. I loved slashdot since I was a kid :(
Yes, I see where this is heading: No longer will Microsoft need to sign pesky contracts promising "sharing" intellectual property with a hard/middle ware vendor. Just accuse them of stealing Microsoft technology and get a good look at their secrets courtesy of the US government. The law needs to include 'Chinese wall' provisions to prevent this happening.
Why do I smell bullshit?
So the solution is stripping the accused of due process: It's the DMCA all-over again. The real question: What will stop Oracle/Microsoft/Apple/Google/FaceBook from attacking each other?
This /. title looks like a bad clickbait.. straight from some free translation service.
"Why Legal Experts Are Up In Arms Over a Trade-Secrets Bill Microsoft Loves "
I'm not native english but "a trade-secrets" does not compile. Do they mean that Microsoft Loves "Trade-Secrets Bill" ?
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Slashdot needs better story moderation. By using click bait language you are poisoning my neural network to actually try to deciper the sentence rater than just ignore it as normal ads. Please do not do this.
Pay your taxes before using our courts.