"Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built.
Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics; in today's legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project. MOSTek was built out of "trade secrets" of Motorola. Unix was only released under a source licensing agreement, and for decades the Lions book, the bible for Unix kernel engineering, was illegal and could not be printed legally, because it contained "trade secrets" (and copyrighted code!) of AT&T. (Or, rather, Western Electric.) Indeed, economists have published a number of papers arguing that that California's prohibitions on non-compete agreements and on employer ownership of private work product underpinned the 1970s–1990s shift from Boston to Silicon Valley.
So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling. Investors, and in this case Google upper management, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg; they want to shift power from engineers, who make things, to lawyers and investors, who specialize in getting paid for them.
This is probably a major factor in the widely-observed shift of the center of innovation from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, where shanzhai ("theft of trade secrets") is a way of life.
I live in a poor country which is poor mostly because the established economic powers are able to strangle new centers of wealth creation in the cradle, using the government and laws. Don't let that happen in your country.
Engineers create wealth. Lawyers and investors just compete to privatize it.