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Comment by darkclouds | Hacker News Reader

Govts look at businesses as entities keeping people out of trouble, then there are the dietary elements which also reduce violence, Obese people are less likely to cause trouble, so Coke (and other soft drinks/food manufacturers) will always come out on top.

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This is so absurd. Laws exist and were broken. In this case state sponsored IP theft was carried out against a business. There are no small fries involved in any of this. Thousand talents is industrialized espionage.

It seems easy enough for me to understand not to steal from anyone.

But not all laws are correct or exist when one should.

So you are saying intellectual property theft should not be illegal?

That sounds reasonable to me. If you want protection, file for a patent and share the information. Society benefits from information being more widely available, so it doesn't make sense to specifically help protect secrets.

Trade secrets are protected by law: https://www.wipo.int/tradesecrets/en/tradesecrets_faqs.html#...

I guess society disagrees, and honestly this like many comments here seem to have an anti-corporate agenda behind them that is truly irrelevant to the facts at hand.

My comment was specifically in reply to whether it should be illegal. Obviously trade secrets are protected by law. My response is that indeed that law is bad, and society has no reason to protect trade secrets by law, and good reason not to (other than some limited protection through contracts maybe, but that should be a civil matter).

The patent system exists to incentivize sharing information through a limited time monopoly. Giving trade secrets an unlimited time monopoly protection by criminalizing someone sharing them undermines that, and means that patents will only be used for low-value ideas that are obvious/easy to independently reinvent or reverse engineer.

Do you think the level of phosphoric acid is safe? Or is a company relying on the inability of medical experts to state the amount in a can is healthy or not.

Do you think IP should come before human health?

What a ridiculous assertion. Nobody forces you to drink that sweet sweet nectar.

Should we legislate everything that might be unhealthy? There are plenty of nanny states who will do that for you, I don't live in one.

If I want to be sure, I'll grow and make it myself. Relying on someone else to tell you always ends the same way, nanny or not. Science still can't agree on aspertame.

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