SCO Thread that will never die (was Re: Maddog at work.)

[Jason Stephenson]

Travis Roy mentions how trade secrets are used to protect the formula 
for Coca-Cola (the beverage that until 1914, or therabouts, actually 
contained coca extract, more commonly known as cocaine). Quick summary: 
If you invent something similar on your own, the Coca-Cola company can't 
do much. However, if (as is more likely) you "acquired" the formula for 
Coca-Cola from a Coca-Cola employee or some other surreptitious means 
and used it to make a competing product, then they could sue the pants 
off of you.

A rather illustrative situation came up in Kentucky recently (in the 
last five years). A couple bought a house that had been owned by the 
Sanders family whose modern patriarch started Kentucky Fried Chicken 
with the secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices.

Well, the folks who had lived there last didn't clean out all the junk, 
and the new owners found some papers in a trunk that contained Sanders' 
original recipe for his pressure-cooker fried chicken, including the 
eleven herbs and spices. Realizing that they had struck gold the new 
owners of the house attempted to sell the recipe to the highest bidder.

The management company that franchises KFC (Jerrico, IIRC) could not 
allow the secret recipe to get out so they cited trade secret 
protections in a civil lawsuit to get the folks to hand over the papers 
and to promise that they'd never reveal what they had learned under 
penalty of law (i.e. NDA).

Entirely OT, I want to add that if you've never had real, southern fried 
chicken or ckicken fried in a pressure cooker, then you haven't had 
fried chicken. It's best, of course, if the bird was raised free range. 
The industrial stuff that you generally find in your supermarket has no 
flavor. Fried turkey is pretty gol'danged good, too. :-)