🚀 go-pugleaf

People are extrapolating from a mistaken understanding of trade secret
law to incorrect conclusions about the possible risk of lawsuits like
that of AT&T vs UCB.  I urge people not to post messages asserting
risks based on extrapolation or speculation, because these are not
reliable where legal questions are concerned.  If you read messages
that do this, keep in mind that the authors are likely to be wrong
about some link in the chain of the argument.

If the UCB release does contain any AT&T trade secrets, then UCB might
be liable for damages for releasing these secrets.  However, this has
no effect on the rest of us who did not participate in UCB's release
of the secrets.  Those former secrets are now public knowledge, and
even those who have signed nondisclosure agreements to keep secrets
about Unix are now allowed to treat them as public knowledge.  We can
go on using Networking 2 with no liability due to trade secret law.

It is unlikely that Mach 3 actually released any AT&T trade secrets.
It is much less related to Unix than BSD is.  But even if it did
release some secrets, only CMU would be liable, not the rest of us.

The real legal risk of using Networking 2 is from the possibility of
copyright infringement.  We cannot avoid liability for this merely by
saying that UCB published it first and said it was ok.  Of course,
this risk applies if the program you distribute really does contain
something carried down from version 7 Unix.  Most parts of Networking
2 does not.  There are also legal arguments that AT&T lost its
copyright through its actions a decade ago (but we don't know whether
the court will accept them).

I think that some laymen assume that a kind of contagion is at work:
if you come in contact with something illegal, then anything you do is
illegal, and likewise for anyone who comes in contact with your work,
and so on.  This is not so.

Copyright applies only to specific copying from AT&T code into your
code.  Trade secret law applies to disclosing specific secrets, and
this depends on what you say.  It does not presume that you have
released a trade secret merely because you have had access to it.

Some of the confusion may be due to the AT&T complain itself.  It is
natural to assume that AT&T is behaving reasonably: that their demands
are lawful if their accusations are true.  This is not even nearly so;
in fact, the reason we know AT&T's conduct is outrageous, even though
we don't know whether parts of Networking 2 contain any AT&T code, is
precisely that they repeatedly say and do things which even the truth
of their accusations would not justify.