Jeannie C. Frommer

We've been living in a world where fast food workers have been asked to sign non-compete agreements. And, you know, historically, people understood non-competes as being for a small number of employees, the highest level employees, the ones with the access to the most sensitive information.

And they're just being deployed as form contracts for so many workers and workers with lower incomes in ways that are keeping them in jobs that they might want to leave and go somewhere else.

Sometimes people are just good at what they do and they have advantages to continue working in the same industry because they know that industry. And their business has over claimed things as secrets and that might prevent them from taking another job.

I know the case through working on trade secret scholarship and teaching. It's a more recent classic, I would say.

So I'll start by saying that one of my favorite books as a kid was Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

When my kids were younger, I was rereading the book to them. And I was struck now that I was working in intellectual property by how much of the story was actually driven by trade secrets. In that Willy Wonka had had to shut down his factory because all of his competitors were sneaking in spies to work there so they could steal his amazing candy innovations.

And he couldn't tolerate it as a business matter anymore, so he shut down.

And so what we learn is that Willy Wonka has found the magical solution to trade secret theft by having Oompa Loompas work in the factory. Why are they the magical solution? Because they don't leave. They live there. So they're not going to be sneaking out any trade secrets. They're paid in chocolate. They're happy. let's not talk about some of the racist and other aspects.

Everything from reading about the Mars company blindfolding any repair people that would come in to fix machines so they wouldn't see anything else, to spies being put into factories and guarding against that. So it felt actually very true to life, and that was a little bit shocking to me.