Sure, but it’s an alternative way a large SaaS provider might attempt to defend whatever competitive advantage its code provides. I’m not saying it’s equivalent or even as good, just that a company with good data controls could probably grow large absent IP laws.
We’d probably also see rapid advances in homomorphic encryption to enable deployed software.
This seems like an odd comment. Yes there is law that protects trade secrets. But you still need to keep the secret a secret. If the secret gets out, it is no longer a trade secret.
The point is that it's difficult to become a big corporation without a monopoly, and it's difficult to maintain a monopoly without government help through patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Trade secrets--which have got nothing to do with with patents, copyrights, and trademarks and I should have just said has much--are another way to maintain a monopoly without government help, but trade secrets themselves are difficult to maintain if the secret gets out, and it almost always gets out.
Corporations get everyone to do things they don't have to against their own interests all the time.
All day every day every industry every level.
"How?" is infinite different ways not any particular one.
Usually it's down to something being 0.001% prettier or more convenient or even a totally fabricated impression that everyone else does it (which then becomes true but is only true after the idea was used).
They sucessfully harness the desire for conformity in some people and also the desire for non-conformity in other people, at the same time for the same products.
They completely effectively harness countless well studied aspects of human nature.
If you're like me, sitting here writing about how cynical and manipulative they all are, they have angles that work on that too.
Harnessing knowledge of human nature does not require government support. Governments don't create human nature.
They use the government where possible, but as just one of countless tools. They don't always get what they want from the governemnent, yet they still make money. As often as not, corporations end up making more money as a result of losing some fight with a government.
All they need to make money is activity. Any activity, even "the government just took away something we were using and dinged us for $200M" 6 months later they are worth twice what they were before, because that was big activity.
If the government takes away a toy they were making money from, they just figure out some other new toy, and in the end the shake-up and (forced) opportunity for change was worth more than what they were making from the status quo.
> Harnessing knowledge of human nature does not require government support
Yeah but fencing it off from others does require government support. If it's human nature to create, it's also human nature to copy. If you create some new worthwhile invention, I'll just copy your invention without even asking you, and without the government there's nothing you can do to stop me.
No, it does not. It's just one of countless levers.
There are countless things anyone can copy or do for free already right now, that countless people pay a company for, for no reason at all. No government enforcement of anything involved.