[sam h]

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I agree that trade secrets often don't have legal protection beyond "voluntary solutions" (which are really "mandatory solutions" in many industries at this point). But the reason that NDAs have any bite is because there is a legal apparatus backing them up and ral consequences to breaking them.

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Yes, and?

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My original point was that this legal apparatus girding trade secrets through enforcing NDAs is part of governmental IP protection, and my understanding was that in your post you were saying that trade secrets were not really legally protected by IP laws.

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I'm not quite sure I completely follow your second point about R&D. I agree that many products will be reverse engineerable, but that doesnt make housing R&D operations unimportant for countries.

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I am not sure that I understand what it means for something to be important "for a country".

R&D is going to be housed wherever it makes the most sense. If region A provides monopoly/patent protection/whatever for the product to be developed and region B doesn't, what impact does this have on the decision as to where to house that R&D? The R&D gets the same protection in region B regardless of whether the engineer working on it is in region A or region B, does it not? And it clearly gets the same lack of protection in either case.

If the R&D gets more protection in region B only if it is actually developed IN region B, then we're talking about a whole new level of corporate welfare. People in region A still get the same stuff, people in region B pay extra for it.

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I'm just saying that firms are generally reluctant to house R%D and many key back-office functions in places where they won't have legal recourse if trade secrets are stolen, NDAs are violated, etc. I have spoken with people or know third hand of many cases in which a company was seriously considering off-shoring functions to a place like Russia (where there is a lot of engineering talent) but decided not to do it because they realized how easily they could get [censored] and how little they could do about it.

Whether its beneficial for a country to house R&D and other higher-end functions is definitely not a cut-and-dry question, but many people think that these kinds of operations have positive spillover effects, as they require a lot of capital investment, the immigration and concentration of talented people, spin-offs and support services in the area, etc.