Template:Derived information
Derived information, the fecund fruits of the receiver’s own creative juice and analytical energy, worked upon information given to the receiver by the discloser, is in no sense “proprietary” to the disclosing party,[1] and may indeed be as commercially sensitive[2] to the receiving party as the material the disclosing party gave, and on which it was based, it in the first place: think of Paul’s middle eight about having a shave and catching the bus in A Day in the Life. We are in danger of getting into the jurisprudential wisdom of treating intellectual endeavour as if it were tangible property — but let’s not go there just now.[3]
Actually, no: let’s do go there. If the information in question not, in the first place, mine — that is to say, it isn’t intellectual property in the first place, then the question arises why I should be able to stop you deriving your own intellectual property out of it. This boils down to whether it was just secret data, but didn’t have any proprietary qualities, or whether it can be somehow configured as proprietary, owned information.
If it is only secret data, it does not have the quality intellectual property at all, so the receiving party’s act in deriving some new type of creative work out of it is a novel thing, owes nothing to the discloser’s disclosure, builds on no intellectual property of the disclosure, and should not be restricted at all. What loss could there be? The data still cannot be disclosed to anyone in a way that would betray the discloser’s confidence, but the derivation may well achieve exactly that: Say you give me a secret data document of a thousand characters on it (i.e., data, and not intellectual property as such), on condition that I keep it confidential. Let’s say I rearrange the thousand characters into a sonnet (which is susceptible of copyright protection) — for argument’s sake, not even adding any new characters. Must I destroy that sonnet, or return it to you, under a confidentiality covenent? Humble report, sir, the answer is no.
If the information you have given me is copyrighted then the agreement you need is a licence, not an NDA. And you can control, within limits, by the law of copyright, from derived works.
- ↑ If the disclosed information ever was proprietary in the first place, that is — if it doesn’t qualify as intellectual property it isn’t, or course.
- ↑ And more deserving of intellectual property protection: applying some analytics to raw trading data may convert it from un-ownable data to creatively juicy intellectual property, of course.
- ↑ Those who can’t resist the siren call, start with Lawrence Lessig’s fabulous Code: Version 2.0.