First, a trade secret is just that, a secret kept by a company because the secret provides the company an advantage
in the marketplace. A famous trade secret is the formula for Coca-Cola. By the way, the name Coca-Cola
is trademarked, and some say it is the most widely recognized brand in the world. The formula for Coca-Cola
is a trade secret, and has been since Coca-Cola was invented in 1886 by John Pemberton, a pharmacist in
Atlanta, GA. We know the formula has changed over the years, because originally it included some cocaine,
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which today??™s formula does not! In any case, the formula has always been a closely and successfully guarded
secret, and resides in a bank vault in Georgia.
Writers of software can protect their work by keeping the code secret. In the early days of computing,
customers often received source code to the software they ran. However, as software has become appreciated
as valuable intellectual property itself, software publishers have begun to regard their source code as a trade
secret. What gets shipped to the customer today is almost always the object code, in machine language, which
is not easily readable by humans. And what the customer buys today is not ownership of the software, but
a license to use the software; the software supplier remains the owner of the intellectual property.
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