A past and future of trade secrets
cabinetmagazine.orgCan’t believe Cabinet is still around. Issue 8’s “bang the keys swiftly” (2002) is still one of my favorite articles re: media history
Reminds me of the "Found: Artifacts from the Future" that used to (still does?) run in the final pages of Wired magazine. I don't really get what this one is trying to say though.
It’s one of those sort of articles by someone who has a hobby of philosophy. For non-hobbyists trying to extract information from it, it becomes an effort of self flagellation. A good litmus test is if any attempt at satire would be inferior to the comedy of the real thing.
I find it best to quickly realize that I am absolutely not the target audience, and move on.
> For non-hobbyists trying to extract information from it, it becomes an effort of self flagellation.
Yes. It's a terrible article about an important subject. Over the last 20 years of US law, patents have been weakened, and trade secret law has been strengthened.[1] This has consequences. Silicon Valley used to have lots of people beating the anti-patent drum, but now nobody knows how anything works inside. We know how Google Search worked in the late 1990s, because it was covered by a published patent. Few people outside Google know how it works now. Self-driving systems are undocumented black boxes. We don't even know what data Tesla cars send when they phone home.
If they'd explored that area in some depth, the article would be more useful. They do touch on it, briefly, but the text occupies less area than those meaningless animated graphs.