Trade Secrets: Elon Musk Is Just Another Hypocritical Tech Billionaire

> Hiding inventions as trade secrets acts to protect these huge multinational corporations against this threat of creative destruction. This is the reason that huge multinationals lobby so hard for strong trade secret laws and weak patent laws. This is clearly shown in Musk’s low valuation of his patents and high valuation of trade secrets.

> Trade secret protection for inventions that could otherwise be patented is bad public policy because it stifles the progress of innovation and it consolidates money, markets and power into a few huge corporations that become immune to the threat of creative destruction.

I wonder what percentage of Silicon Valley tech corps exclusively use trade secrets (vs. using the patent system)?

Why have we as a society decided to fund the enforcement of trade secrets? Laws protecting trade secrets seem about the most undemocratic mechanism/phenomenon I’ve come across.

Won’t we look back in 100 years and laugh at the insanity of what is essentially violently-enforced ‘privatized knowledge’, enabled by our punitive justice system (being able to put other humans in jail for ‘theft’ of trade secrets)?

What if we move from private ownership accounting to commons accounting? [1] Would that enable us to more clearly see and organize the material natural resource flows in our economy, while at the same time unlocking the wealth of immaterial flows (digital knowledge/information)? In other words, by using a network resource accounting system proposed by Mikorizal, can we move away from using systems that enforce the artificial scarcity of knowledge?

[1] http://mikorizal.org/Fromprivateownershipaccountingtocommons...