[glass3]

If your employees go to a competitor and make a secret sauce that tastes the same, how do you judge what is the source of knowledge?

They can have used their skills to come up with a recipe that tastes the same because the requirements led to that outcome, or they simply copied your recipe.

If somebody from OpenAI goes to a competitor and creates something like ChatGPT, where is the line crossed that shows that company IP is transferred? The employee knows how to create the system because he knows how ChatGPT works. If he recreates a similar system but doesn't say that it is a copy of ChatGPT, is that applied skill or is that a violation of the NDA?

If it is a violation, how could he forget the structure of ChatGPT to genuinely come up with a new structure?

[namaria]

Legislatures write rules, people enter contracts, sue for perceived breaches and courts rule on these disputes. People then adjust behaviors to get desired results without incurring legal liabilities. Results vary across jurisdiction. Such questions can't be answered in principle. California famously won't enforce non-compete clauses, and that apparently helps innovation. China caught up industrially with the West within one generation by flouting every IP rule we have here. On the other side of the debate, patent trolls...