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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how the list of highly ranked providers can be a "trade secret" of Angie's List if they make it public to their millions of subscribers. Isn't a trade secret usually something like a closely-guarded process, like the recipe for Coca Cola?

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Well, trade secret laws vary state by state, but Data General Corp. v. Digital Computer Controls, Inc. seems to support their claim that a paywall is enough to claim the information is "protected."

In that case, Data General sent design documents to anyone who bought their computers, with a contractual agreement informing about their confidentiality, and that was deemed to be protected and therefore DCC to be at fault for using them for making a nearly identical computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Corp._v._Digital_....

Unfortunately, it looks like Hacker News deletes periods at the end of links, so this link won't work.

If you want to read the article, you can just add a period to the end of the URL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Corp._v._Digital_...

You can use %2e at the end of your URL it seems to come out as intended.

Good idea. I've done that above (hopefully icebraining won't mind) and will add it to our list of things to fix (edit: if there's a way to do so that doesn't break normal punctuation). Thanks to both of you!

Stripping periods is probably beneficial more often than not. Also commas and closing parentheses, I imagine. Ideally the script would test url before modifying.

I seriously, just a few minutes before reading this thread, out a period after a URL and was concerned "will this break? who is parsing the links, and in what scenarios will the period accidentally be considered part of the URL?" and decided "engh, I bet nothing expects periods at the end of URLs and thereby it will get chopped off, and people putting periods at the ends of URLs probably learn quickly that that causes problems and avoid doing that"... and then I read this thread ;P.

I actually have seen urls that ended with a long row of commas, now that I think of it. Empty parameters, I guess.

Empty parameters won't affect the url resolution (normally), they'll just be passed as empty to the same url. (Assuming the parameters were in the querystring as they should be...).

No, not in the querystring. I didn't mean GET parameters.

Curiously it works for me, maybe it was fixed?

dang is a moderator and indicated he modified your comment to put the escape sequence.

Amazon definitely will have a fairly decent argument that it wasn't a protected trade secret. Typically using an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) as means of protection is fine. But, millions of users who can sign up pay paying a token amount and then click a button or two? NDA might not be enough.

Indiana's trade secret has to be "the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy." But it doesn't have to "extravagant" effort.

But notice that "under the circumstances" is included. If I were angies list, I'd say that they did all they could.

I'm an Angie's List subscriber and signed no NDA agreement with them.

It doesn't make sense for it to be a trade secret, but it could be copyrighted. An exhaustive list of data (like the phonebook) is not copyrightable (in the US, though it may be in other countries), but a selective list can potentially be copyrightable based on the selection criteria.

That said, copyright doesn't prevent someone from using the list and contacting the providers in question. A contract might, and it sounds like Angie's List has a contract that does.

Its the extra value added to the list, often called "collation value". If you take a bunch of public domain resources, and organise and classify them, your organisation and taxonomy is copyrightable even if the resources are not. It is tne IPR associated with the work you put into it.

In the US there has to be a certain level of creativity in the selection and organization to copyright a collection of facts. The classic case is the phone book, where there is no creativity in the selection (everyone with a phone in this region) or the organization (alphabetical order), and so no copyright. Feist vs. Rural Telephone is the major case on this.

That level of creativity is not very high, but it is above zero. See this comment from a couple weeks ago for more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887035

See Feist vs. Rural Telephone Company for an example case of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

For all intents and purposes it states that factual information by itself cannot be copyrighted.

I agree, if I (as a non-agent of Angie's list) can just sign up and access the data, it's not really a trade secret.

I was under the impression that, like copyright, it mainly hinged on your ability to show your willingness to protect it. That, plus a correct EULA, should protect other companies from using it commercially.

The trade secret angle is a LITTLE baffling.

As far as I know, copyright is not hinged on your ability to show your willingness to protect it, that's trademarks.

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