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Comment by consz | Hacker News Reader

Is there actually a difference? If he had memorized every detail in those documents, that would have been okay -- but taking the documents isn't? Is the former only okay because it seems practically unlikely for one human to memorize everything?

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I think there is a difference. You can't really operate a competing company off of the contents of one person's brain. You need a documented body of knowledge that the whole company can refer to, with meta-information including how the research was undertaken.

Having the actual documents makes a huge practical difference. In the absence of the documents, the employee's new company basically has to re-do the research under the employee's guidance.

> can't really operate a competing company off of the contents of one person's brain. You need a documented body of knowledge that the whole company can refer to, with meta-information including how the research was undertaken

Some will disagree because there exist people who can memorize everything.

No they can't. And no you still need , because one person can't do all work.

Aren't there people with photographic memory?

Or you are saying that a person can't create a plan to be followed by people below him?

IANAL, but I assume that if someone actually memorized a confidential document, rewrote it from memory, and showed it to people at another company, it would be equivalent to just walking out the door with the physical document in the eyes of the law. judges tend not to be amused by these kinds of logical gymnastics.

Not in that sense, no. I am sure no one on Earth would be able to reproduce a 600x600 pic identical to original.

It would be a life's work for anyone to memorize 600kb text only file.

>If he had memorized every detail in those documents, that would have been okay.

He wouldn't have been okay. In most states, trade secrets don't have to be contained in a document or other recording. If you memorize the formula to Coca-Cola, it is still a trade secret. The dividing line between skill/experience/general-knowledge and a trade secret is fuzzy.

Though, its a lot harder to win a trade secret case when the alleged trade secret is only in the mind of the defendant because it's harder to show that you misappropriated it.

I'm not sure the point of this hypothetical. If he'd done something that nobody can possibly do, then yes, it would be different. We don't need to worry about people memorizing entire product schematics and then reproducing them.

there has to be a legal dividing line that separates using knowledge from theft, and I think that's a pretty good one

Law often eschews dividing "lines" though, in favor of fuzzy gray areas.

Somebody will inevitably reply that I'm wrong, and then I'll still travel slightly over the speed limit with no consequences for ~5 hours today.

It often does, and it also often avoids doing so. And there is a debate within the legal community about which approach is better.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright-line_rule for a starting place to learn more about this.

Sure, but if you get pulled over while doing so the "Law" will be well within it's right to issue you a ticket despite your protestations of fuzzy gray areas. The law is quite clear here the fuzziness is purely in the discretion we grant enforcers of that law.

I wasn't drawing a distinction between the law as written and the law as enforced, because the latter is the one that matters in a practical sense. So sure, if you make that distinction, my comment doesn't make much sense.

The discretion police use is a huge gray area that is often problematic, but probably less problematic than not having a gray area.

Yes. There is a difference between general knowledge that enables you to reproduce an effect and specific documents and code that embody your old employers concrete implementation.

It seems very plausible that an engineer might be more productive at Company A rather than Company B. But that's less likely to be the case for some specific ideas in some documents; if Company A is better at using some ideas you'd think they'd generally be better at coming up with them in the first place. So in terms of the benefits to society it makes sense to facilitate engineers moving but not documents.

it would also create a weird incentive to avoid creating documents at all for ideas you believe a competitor might be able to execute better.

There has to be a difference. You shouldn't become such an experienced person at X or Y that it's actually illegal for you to change jobs now. If you are in a particular field you should be valuable to stay in that field, and changing jobs is a right. People need to ability to change jobs as much as they like and there should be no blacklist.

Even if that were possible, the societal harm caused by effectively making it illegal for someone to change jobs within their field is not worth the benefit.

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