The proposal is just to ask firms to put money where their mouths are.
They should pay him 500k just because he knows a secret? even if he's making just 50k to the company?
In practice, trade secrets are protected by other mechanisms. Patents are one of them because, by definition, patents are public knowledge so they are no longer secret.
As a corollary, you may read a patent and now have the knowledge of a product. But you don't have the same legal right to create and sell that product. That right is protected by the patent owner.
I am no expert here but my understanding is that the case law around this is much more well trodden in patent land than it is for noncompetes
If they had not patented whatever it is they had, anyone could replicate the information/item in question with no penalty.
If it did not provide value to tell the employee the secret then it follows that company would/should not tell the employee the secret.
If it's truly patented (different from a trade secret), you can't produce it, even if your invention is slightly different. For example, if I hold a patent on a "car" and you make a "car with a radio," you still can't produce it because it infringes on my patent. You can't make your product without covering the totality of my claim. That's why people try to make patent claims as broad as possible.
Sure, I suppose someone could develop/copy something in parallel with no knowledge. But that's not really the case in the discussion here as it comes to former employees.
If you worked for Company A which uses a proprietary algorithm for trading and somehow created the same for Company B later, would you really expect a jury to think the two are unrelated? As stated above, the threshold is "more likely than not" that your work for Company B is related to knowing the trade secrets of Company A. If you had never worked for Company A, maybe, but again that's not the case here because a noncompete would never enter the picture.
I mean that’s a tad disingenuous as to how it worked before patents. Patents were meant to dissuade others from copying inventions for a certain set period. It was much rarer to see independent development of the same technology (not that it didn’t happen).
I guess I'm not seeing the point made. If you agree it wasn't developed in parallel, you copied it from your previous employer. If it was their IP, you likely committed a civil wrong, and they can sue you. I can only see your point if you don't believe IP exists.
A patent is an example that shows why that is a bad principle. The point of a patent is to share knowledge, but it also gives claims of ownership (for a period) to only a specific party. So obviously "knowledge of a product/process" isn't the discriminator. The important portion of a patent that distinguishes what is owned is literally called its "claims." My point is that whether or not you have knowledge does not lay claim to ownership, contrary to u/akira2501's question/point.