A past and future of trade secrets

It is easy to dismiss Webster’s timeline as a useless source for trade secret law. It doesn’t cross-reference well with established sources, and its algorithmic origins render its organizational logic opaque and its selection criteria unknowable. By conventional standards, it fails as an entry point into the topic. It begins with a 1624 entry on the English guilds and proceeds quickly to 1789, the year in which Nicolas Leblanc committed suicide after the seizure of his sodium carbonate factory during the French Revolution left him penniless and his trade secrets at the mercy of his competitors. I could not find many of Webster’s sources in my cursory analysis, and, overall, the sourcing is inconsistent: some entries provide extensive citations, while others offer none at all. Even when sources are provided, they range from academic publications to Wikipedia entries and obscure, difficult-to-verify materials. The book mentions none of the landmark court cases from trade secret history: 1837’s Vickery v. Welch (chocolate), 1868’s Peabody v. Norfolk (“sacred” factory machinery), 1984’s Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto (democracy).[5] It devotes a significant amount of words across its thirty-nine pages to “Scientology versus The Internet.”[6] Given this lack of correlation with any established history of trade secrets, which makes the book’s data points more like clusters of false positives in an MRI scan, what would the target audience—someone “not good at the internet” and without prior knowledge of the subject matter—learn from this algorithmically generated timeline? And would it be any different if a human had assembled it?