A past and future of trade secrets

Yes. It's a terrible article about an important subject. Over the last 20 years of US law, patents have been weakened, and trade secret law has been strengthened.[1] This has consequences. Silicon Valley used to have lots of people beating the anti-patent drum, but now nobody knows how anything works inside. We know how Google Search worked in the late 1990s, because it was covered by a published patent. Few people outside Google know how it works now. Self-driving systems are undocumented black boxes. We don't even know what data Tesla cars send when they phone home.

If they'd explored that area in some depth, the article would be more useful. They do touch on it, briefly, but the text occupies less area than those meaningless animated graphs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defend_Trade_Secrets_Act