Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill November 19th, 2007

This isn’t really my area, but I find the idea of “secrets” fascinating.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling last Friday in an interesting case. An Oregon Islamic charity named Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation came to believe that it had been the object of warrantless wiretapping surveillance in the aftermath of September 11, and brought a civil action against President Bush and other US government officials.

During the proceedings, government lawyers inadvertently delivered to Al-Haramain a National Security Administration call log marked “Top Secret” together with other unclassified information. The log (which the court’s opinion doesn’t actually describe) was given to Al-Haramain’s attorneys and directors and seen by a Washington Post journalist. The FBI then collected all copies of the log from Al-Haramain’s counsel (though perhaps not from its directors).

The Ninth Circuit ultimately held that the log, though it had been disclosed, still counted as a “state secret” and could not be used by Al-Haramain to support its warrantless wiretapping claims. It sounds like that was their only piece of solid evidence, so the pundits say the organization’s chances of success are now close to nil.

What intrigues me about this is what “secret” means here. Apparently it means “still secret even though it has been disclosed”. Had this been a trade secrets case in which, say, the mythic Coca-Cola formula had been inadvertently disclosed to Pepsi Co it is hard to believe that the court would have still called it a “secret”- once disclosed there is no more secret.

To my eye (admittedly inexperienced in these matters), the court punts on this. It says, offering some rather thin reasoning and assurances that it reviewed the materials and found them to be very sensitive indeed, that even though the secret was disclosed to Al-Haramain, the government had not waived the state secrets privilege.

It sounds like the court was concerned that in a different set of circumstances the secret information could have been made completely public, destroying any shred of actual secrecy. Worried about pointing toward such a course of action in future inadvertent disclosure cases, the court allowed the government to maintain the fiction that the information was still secret.

So to answer the initial question, a trade secret ceases to exist once disclosed.  A state secret can apparently be much more open and retain its secret identity.  Interesting indeed.

• neologisms

Jay Parkhill October 12th, 2007

The term “cleantech” has always bothered me. It’s so broad that its meaninglessness becomes quickly apparent as soon as one starts to look at all the different sectors it covers. At a mini-conference I attended yesterday, though, panelist James Horn from VC firm Noventi made a useful point about the term.

He said that people use the word “cleantech” in much the same way that they used “internet” in the 1990s- it is a term of convenience that exists in large part because the space is still new enough that the general public doesn’t recognize many of the sub-categories. Just as general “internet” business has given way to “content delivery networks”, “social networks”, “Software as a Service”, etc., so will “cleantech” be used less as people become familiar with the different flavors of energy, waste remediation, materials, etc.

I like that idea, not least because it reminds me what a huge mindshift occurred in the 90’s when the Internet was new, before it got woven so tightly into the fabric of society. I’m sure hoping the cleantech principles get adopted so quickly.

Bonus neologism: I got an email from Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, in which he talked about the growth of “green collar jobs”. I love that term.

• Cleantech , neologisms

Jay Parkhill August 19th, 2007

Suddenly this week I’ve started hearing the term “social graph” all over. Brad Feld has been talking about it and so has Fred Wilson, though it looks like they both read the same piece published last week by Brad Fitzpatrick, developer of the LiveJournal blogging platform. As I understand it, the social graph is the glue that ties people together over the web- whether it be a set of Outlook contacts or MySpace friends.

I hadn’t heard the term before so I googled it and got a bunch of hits going back at least a few months, though it seems to have gained more currency in the last month or so. It’s a decent phrase, though a little wonky and hard to pin down (compared to say, “web 2.0″, ha!). Wikipedia doesn’t seem to recognize it officially and refers readers to the entry on “social network” instead.

Substantively, social graph is a much broader idea than the social network dashboard I have blogged about previously. Fitzpatrick’s article is essentially a manifesto for an open source framework that all networks could use as a backdrop for contacts and organization, among other things. It’s a cool idea for sure and I’d love to see it happen.

As I think about it, though, the work required for a user to flesh out a set of contacts on any social network is part of what keeps the user loyal to the platform. Loyalty means, largely, pageviews and advertising click-throughs, i.e. the main source of revenue for most networks. If my contact set becomes a “commodity” I can drop in to any network, will I jump around among networks more readily?

Maybe, or maybe not. Lots of people belong to six zillion networks already so it isn’t like we would suddenly all switch off Linkedin and turn on Facebook- maybe we just gravitate more toward one or another as featuresets evolve. More to the point, I read Fitzpatrick as saying in part that developing the social graph-building tools is hard work that essentially reinvents the wheel every time. An open-source social graph “standard wheel” would free up companies to focus more on the content. Actually, commoditizing the contacts would require networks to focus on differentiation of their content/platform/benefits rather than just locking in users.

As I write this, I realize that idea sounds a lot like Facebook’s F8 platform, but without the “inbound only” traffic flow that so many people have expressed frustration with. No wonder Fitzpatrick’s idea hit a nerve with Feld and Wilson.

• Web , neologisms , social graph , social media

Jay Parkhill August 18th, 2007

I became a lawyer in part because I love words and writing and analyzing how people use language. That’s why I am inaugurating a new occasional series on this blog devoted to “neologisms”- clever turns of phrase that capture an idea especially well. Here are the first two entries:

Duke Energy’s Chairman and CEO James Rogers talks about energy issues as in need of “cathedral thinking“- just like Europe’s great cathedrals took centuries to build, weaning the world off carbon-based fuels is likely to take a similar amount of time. It is a brilliant phrase- though I don’t know if Rogers coined it- because it evokes grandeur, an epic scale, enduring structures and also a long time frame for planning, development and construction. As head of a company built on carbon-based fuels that probably sees the end of its lifeblood somewhere in the distant, but foreseeable future, it works perfectly to capture the pace at which Duke is comfortable working on the issues as well.

Meanwhile, on Terrapass’s blog Adam Stein talks about “magic pony thinking“- where some environmentalists reject certain proposed solutions because they aren’t sweeping enough and put forward an idea like “dismantling the suburbs and trading cars for light rail and bicycles”, in Adam’s words. Adam gives full credit for the term to the John and Belle blog, and ultimately a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

“Magic pony” is a powerful turn of phrase. It is an incredibly derisive way to lambast another viewpoint as failing to address (perceived) real world facts. It’s a gem of a phrase, but also a double-edged weapon that seems as likely to lead to a flame war as a thoughtful comparison of viewpoints. Maybe sensing this, Adam offers up “distraction theory” as well, a slightly less perjorative way of saying the same thing. Fighting words, all the same.

• Cleantech , green , neologisms