Originally Posted by
socrates
1) while the assumption that points are cheap is correct, the pricing above is way off
2) I personally feel I have a decent understanding of the laws of our country but am certainly not even close to being a lawyer but I dont believe your argument about confidential and proprietary information no longer being such once it's posted in the public demain would hold up in court - it's kind of like saying it's ok to murder someone because the were dead after the fact so it really wasn't murder in the first place
I'm not a lawyer but let's assume I have some professional expertise in this area :-)
A 'trade secret' has some special protections which apply to it only when kept secret. If publicly disclosed then it is no longer a secret and no longer legally protected. However the circumstances under which the information becomes public are highly-relevant and hence ...
"you are both right" - in the very specific area of trade secrets.
w.r.t. confidential information more generally- it would need to be clearly proven by the party claiming that the information is confidential AND that the person posting was aware of this fact, had received the information with notification and so forth in order for the information to be suppressable. These principles are general, country-specific laws apply of course - including the special protections on free speech in certain countries such as the US first amendment.
This of course doesn't stop lawyers from issung takedown notices etc., even when they have little chance of winning any subsequent case, and for site owners on the internet to remove potentially-infringing content in order to avoid the complications of being involved in an expensive court case.
(let's not even get into the issues about LINKING to content, which causes even more complications, depending on what a judge interprets a link to be.)