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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.
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.
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!
How ever the sound limit on prosecution from breaching trade secrets is the actual theft and only the theft, beyond that nothing. You had a secret, it was exposed tough luck, you should have patented it and if it wasn't patentable then you have nothing. The problem is they simply can not claim it is impossible to come up with the same solution. It looks very much like M$ is shifting to a litigation and marketing engine and it wants to claim as criminal exposure of it's massive invasion of privacy Windows anal probe 10 as an infringement of it's trade secrets. How far it will go to steal your information and you intellectual property and how it will do it, apparently will become defined as a trade secret and any exposure of it a criminal offence. You can wrap all sorts of stuff around trade secrets eg a list of customers is a trade secret.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen