third parties

[lauren at rand-unix.ARPA]

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--