3 ms·

Why would the legal risk ever be over?

• wolfgke 8y ago
  > Why would the legal risk ever be over? I can imagine some scenarios: - A company is bought by another one which has a different legal policy and voids some legal restrictions even retroactively - By some other way, the "illegal" knowledge in the paper became "public knowledge", so that company lawyers will have a hard(er) time convincing a judge that the respective paper is of any danger and thus the author to be prosecuted. For example: After these microcode patches, people will of course privately do benchmark the performance differences. So some years later, the order of performance differences are kind of public knowledge. - With time, companies have a much less legal interest to sue people for disclosre. As long as there is a high commercial interest, companies can be very "sue-happy". On the other hand, each of these lawsuits is a PR risk for the company. If the respective product becomes outdated, the ecomonical advantage of a lawsuite is much less than the probable PR loss. - The researcher now (later on) lives in a different country that has a different legal system where there is much less legal risk. For example, in Germany, it is very restricted what can be included in the general business terms (in opposite to the USA). In all of these cases, it can become much less legally dangerous to disclose the real identity of the author. On the other hand, there exists an incentive (academic credit) to do so.