Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

> It would be untenable to produce software for profit if any of your employees could walk off with your source code after your investment and set up a competing business selling the same thing at a cut rate.

You can still ask your employees to keep things secret, of course. Just without government as your enforcer. What would generally happen is you'd have to sweeten the terms of employment to make sure your people are happy. Profits for existing shareholders would drop, probably significantly, but the market would still churn out goods as before, and wages would rise.

> with the exception of a few programs

I would say at this point the majority of important software are not protected by trade secrets (TCP/IP, Linux Kernel, XNU Kernel, Git, DNS, SQLite, MySQL to name a few of many thousands). Tens of thousands of people are paid to work on these open source software products, and yet generally remain with their employers, even though they could "walk out the door" at any moment.

Secrets are fine. Government enforcement of secrets I find highly questionable, and only in the interests of the 1%.

Likely not.

First off, some background. In order to prevent someone else from patenting your idea, absent being the first to file it yourself, you need to disclose it in such a way that it qualifies as "prior art", thereby rendering invalid any subsequent attempts to patent the invention.

Now, what does that disclosure look like? First, let's talk about the Enablement Requirement:

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2164.html

Quoting from that section: "The information contained in the disclosure of an application must be sufficient to inform those skilled in the relevant art how to both make and use the claimed invention."

This is a general requirement both for patents, and for relevant prior art. In particular, with respect to prior art specifically, if you look at 2121 part III of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2121.html ) you find the term "enabling disclosure":

"A prior art reference provides an enabling disclosure and thus anticipates a claimed invention if the reference describes the claimed invention in sufficient detail to enable a person of ordinary skill in the art to carry out the claimed invention"

There's also some rules about a POSITA being able to find the prior art. For example, with respect specifically to publications, in section 2128.2 of the manual (https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2128.html) we find:

"'A reference is proven to be a "printed publication" "upon a satisfactory showing that such document has been disseminated or otherwise made available to the extent that persons interested and ordinarily skilled in the subject matter or art, exercising reasonable diligence, can locate it."'

So just writing down the invention and sticking it a drawer doesn't count! The inventor must have been able to find the prior art.

Anyway, this is all to say: Simply publishing a hash of a document to prove you have it is almost certainly not sufficient to invalidate a patent application, since such a disclosure clearly doesn't meet the Enablement Requirement for prior art, nor does it meet the requirement for being discoverable.

As a random aside: this touches on why the idea of defensive patenting or defensive publication exists. Suppose you come up with an invention where protection of the invention (either patent protection or trade secret) has no value to you, but where you want to avoid being sued by someone else in the case of independent invention.

In that case, it's not at all uncommon to file a patent application or otherwise disclose the invention in a notable publication (like, say, a journal) so as to prevent someone else from acquiring a patent on that invention. And note I say "application". You don't need to be granted the patent! The application is enough to qualify as prior art (and in fact it's not at all uncommon to see abandoned patent applications cited as prior art by patent examiners in patent prosecution wrappers, which are publicly available to anyone via the USPTO Public Pair system).

>> This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more.

Not sure about this instance but in general, people dont get to some promontory then lose it all doing something illegal/unethical. They often rise up the ranks -- doing illegal/unethical things the entire way up. You just see the time they got caught (the last time) and it seems they could have stopped at step n-1.

Its not just about shareholders. You can better spread bonuses for overall happiness of employees and overall better productivity.

Please don't use code blocks for quotes. It makes it very hard to read text on mobile, narrow viewports or via screen readers.