lauren@rand-unix.ARPA (03/22/85)
As a general rule, the disclosure portions of agreements tend to specify that information received from third parties may only be considered to be "unprotected" IF that information was NOT floating around as a result of a license/contract violation somewhere up the line. Even without an explicit clause to this effect, courts may rule that this is the case. In other words, let's say that Joe Blow ("A") has some trade secret. He licenses it to party "B". B then hands it out (without permission/appropriate licensed restrictions) to party "C". In the cases I've seen, "C" does not have any legal right to the disclosed information, since the original non-licensed disclosure was made in violation of a license by B. Now, if A had told B, "do anything you want with this info, there are no restrictions", the sequence would be different. But we are assuming in this case that the disclosure to B was under license, and that B did not have the legal right to give the info to C. In this case (A -> B information transfer under license) C does not have legal access to the information, and the trade secret nature of the information is still protected (according to various court decisions). By the way, I just saw another court case that extended trade secret protection from source code to the compiled/loaded object code. All of the above sort of stuff is subject to court interpretation of course, but the general trend of decisions seems to be increasingly in favor of trade secret and copyright protections. --Lauren--