Originally posted by droidhacker
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I have offered a few times to use something different if someone can come up with a good catch-all word that covers trade secrets, patents, copyrighted code, along with anything similar that I might have forgotten to mention. So far I have received a few rants back but nothing I could actually use in a sentence
Obvious terms like "secrets" don't work because we're really talking about a mix of "secrets" and "legally protected" stuff. The best I could come up with was "secret sauce" but that's kinda hokey too.
Obvious terms like "secrets" don't work because we're really talking about a mix of "secrets" and "legally protected" stuff. The best I could come up with was "secret sauce" but that's kinda hokey too.
You can't.
Trademarks have nothing to do with secrets or keeping things restricted. It is just to document you produced a certain item and nobody else can claim that their knock-off products was created by you.
Copyrights are not about keeping anything secret either. It's about restricting the types of copying you can do of certain, specific, and abritrary types of goods.
Patents are not about keeping secrets. In fact they are suppose to do the entire opposite. You are suppose to be putting your inventions into the public domain in order to get a patent in the first place.
What is more trademarks are not suppose to stop people from copying your products. Patents are not about copying either. Only copyrights are about copying. With patents you violate patents whether or not you invented something independently yourself and you just happen to accidentally do something covered by a patent or you intentionally copied a patent document it is not relevent, except in when awarding damages. It makes no difference if you copied or it was independently created.
The fact that people can dream up scenarios were any of these three things can be used to create secrecy or restricted access to information goes to show how fundamentally broke and corrupt the very concept of IP is.
Now the only truly legitimate form of IP, in my opinion, is going to be trade secrets. People sign NDAs to work on stuff they need to follow those NDAs. If a corporation wants to keep something secret they should be able to. However if somebody is able to reverse engineer their product and use that knowledge then that is 100% OK also. It's all fair game.
The only legit restrictions that people should be required to follow are ones that they volunteered for and agreed to follow.
Now with video cards you also have additional things like DMCA... which is so much screaming heaping bullshit I cannot even begin to fathom. Ostensibly it's about piracy, but it is in fact a cold, very purposeful, completely deliberate and malicious (from a free market standpoint) set of laws and punishments designed to leverage copyright to provide the large international media corporations (and friends) the ability to dictate software and hardware design for the sole purpose of maintaining market dominance and controlling distribution channels. You obey 'Hollywood' or the government will shut you down.
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