Hey ya'll,
So today we covered patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and other things related to these. To be honest I'm still a little confused on the difference between all three, because it seems like there's a gray area when it comes to distinguishing them.
Let's take Google as an example. The Google logo is a trademark, and to make things really simple, let's look at their search engine. This search engine is pretty much a ton of code and algorithms that involves many processes and hardware even to complete, servers, warehouses, etc.
We can define Google's search engine as a trade secret in a sense, no? I've studied before how they approach the search function and at it's very basic point, it's a implementation of PageRank, an algorithm. It's definitely not open sourced, and people can have little search bars on their pages to allow users to search within that site itself for things. PageRank is what started Google off so I definitely don't think they'd want to release it. However, PageRank is actually considered a patent, because, well, it's patented by Google.
So which is it? A patent or a trade secret? I guess the easiest way to explain it is that PageRank itself is a patented product, but the trade secret lies in all the secret criteria they use it in to figure out how to best rank pages in a Google Search.
Agree or not? Let me know in the comments belooowwww!
Google patented the PageRank algorithm and how it functions conceptually, i.e. the method of assigning an importance rank to a webpage by looking at the importance ranks of all the webpages that are citing it.
ReplyDeleteThe patent doesn't contain any code, just a few relevant mathematical equations. See here: http://www.google.com/patents/US6285999?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false
The actual software and hardware setup they created and use is the trade secret. That's one of the reasons a lot of large companies (FB, Google, Amazon) have been secretive about the insides and designs of their server warehouses.
You raise a great question. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe you are correct. There is a big grey area between what is and what isn't a trade secret. Same with a trademark versus a copyright. Hopefully we can clear this up next class!
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