Article 1

Save Money, Save Energy, Save Earth

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/save-money-save-energy-save-earth,348043.shtml

EnergyHotwire.com is a website soon to be released on Earth Day (April 22nd). It's goal is to save American's money and help the environment by cutting energy usage throughout the nation. It all sounds like a good deal, but I'm concerned that they may end up getting sued by some power companies. They say in the article, "EnergyHotwire.com goes beyond tidbits of energy-saving tips by teaching everyone topic by topic, basement to attic, hundreds of energy-saving facts and trade secrets, most of which are never disclosed by utility or fuel supplier companies." They are releasing trade secrets? That doesn't sound like such a good idea. Either the secrets aren't really secrets (or are very poor secrets that no one cares about), or they will almost definitely be getting sued.

This reminded me about the case in the book about the guy that worked for Gateway and then turned around and posted stuff on his website about how much they sucked. How do they intend to post actual "trade secrets" and not get nailed? I guess we'll find out.

Article 2

Florida suspends Allstate from writing new policies

http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2008/04/florida_suspends_allstate_from.html

Florida has recently forced all insurance companies that do business in the state to reduce their premiums for FL customers. AllState, who apparently has not sufficiently reduced their prices, was asked to provide the government with documents showing their pricing policies so that they could be analyzed. AllState refused to produce the documents, as that would be releasing their trade secrets to the public. They went to court over this issue, but in the end, the appeals court made AllState publish 150,000 pages of documents to their website for all to see. Allstate is outraged that they have to publicly display some of their trade secrets.

I'm actually really surprised that they had to publicize these documents. What sort of protection does that give them and their trade secrets. As we learned in class, you have to go to sufficient lengths to protect the secret in order for it to be classified a trade secret. Does that mean that they were more or less forced to abandon some of their trade secrets?

Article 3

Company Spies

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1994/05/dreyfuss.html

In a nutshell, it states that the CIA is openly working with US automobile producers to boost the US auto economy. How? The CIA is going to send spies to foreign automobile companies to gather intelligence on technologies and business strategies (lots and lots of trade secrets). Once they get the intelligence information, the CIA declassifies it and openly shares it with the US automobile industry. How can they get away with this? Why are our foreign allies letting us do it? This is obviously public information, so why aren't Japan, Germany, England or any of the other countries seeking legal or political action against us about this?

We talked briefly about industrial espionage in class / in the articles, and it was pretty clear that its illegal. I'm not sure if international industrial espionage was mentioned, but that is no doubt illegal too. How on earth are we getting away with this?