> If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly never notice, no criminal law would apply, and you'd have a hell of a time proving it i

> If amazon copied all your proprietary data, you would almost certainly never notice, no criminal law would apply, and you'd have a hell of a time proving it in a civil suit. For a thought exercise, let's play this out. Amazon copies data running through VMs (or grabs it from storage). Let's assume it isn't on hardware certified for capital-letter processing [1], most of which require regular third party audits. So they have your illegally-obtained data [2], which presumably they want to use to make money. Except they can't leave any record of its source, in any documented form. This includes server logs, data transfers, emails about data, meeting minutes about data. So they create some isolated network, run by a third party contractor, that transfers encrypted data from the taps to a store, then decrypts. All of which brings us to the most difficult part. Who does... what with it? The source data itself is radioactive. Who knows when "pricing strategy for company X" or obvious equivalent might pop up in the stream? So you... what? Exclusively touch it via algorithm that outputs only aggregate information? How do you possibly code and maintain that pipeline, sight unseen? All while risking an incredibly profitable business. Or, you know, you just operate as an honest IaaS provider and make $10B in revenue / quarter with a 25% growth rate... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/programs/ [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511 (?)