> No. A trade secret is a lot like virginity. Once it's lost its lost.
> Doesn't much matter the reason or the method. RSA lost the trade secret on
> RC4 once the code got out (or was reverse engineered depending upon who you
> believe). They couldn't cry foul and make everybody forget. They could
> claim patent and copyright and all of that type stuff, but trade secret is
> the most ephemeral of all of the intellectual property rights. It's up to
> you to protect it and if it's lost, you have no recourse to regain it, even
> if you have legal, actionable, leverage against the parties who have revealed
> it. In this case, if it was their screw-up, some manager may have a new
> hairless rug in his office tommorrow morning, but the trade secret is gone
> forever.
You cannot patent something that has been published before. A lot of
companies publish their discoveries in small swedish (or finnish ;-) )
local newspapers with a volume of 300 or less. This way, probably noone
would ever discover it, but if someone claims a patent on, let's say the
recipe of Coke, than they can say it's been published in 1902 in
Komsumulski and the patent is void.
Kurt
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