#5- Must Be True, Author's Perspective

[jgabalski]

Can someone please help me understand why E is the correct answer here, and what material in the passage backs it up? I chose A for this question. My main justification was the authors explanation of the "many small (subconscious) contributions that one might make to a team effort." I took this to mean that the small, subconscious actions could have a potentially greater impact than the concrete items. Does the phrase "can do more harm" in answer choice A have anything to do with it being incorrect? Thank you for the help.

[Adam Tyson]

I'll do my best, jgabalski!

Answer E is supported by pretty much the entire passage, in that the passage is all about how trade secrets are hard to protect with injunctions because they can be so thoroughly bound up in what the employee knows that cannot be protected without unfairly preventing them from working. Now, look at the last line of the passage:

It is therefore unlikely that an injunction against disclosure of trade secrets to future employers actually prevents any transfer of information except for the passage of documents and other concrete embodiments of the secrets.

(emphasis added)

In this line, the author is telling us that while injunctions won't typically do much good when it comes to what people have in their heads, they will at least work for those concrete things (the "except" portion of the statement). In other words, you may not be able to stop me from applying my acquired knowledge, but at least you can enjoin me from sharing a pilfered copy of the employee manual, a blueprint, a memo, etc.

Answer A is without support because the author never makes any such comparison in the passage. While it is primarily concerned with the skills and knowledge that are in the employees themselves, as opposed to in documents and other tangible things, it never says those are more damaging than the concrete things. What's worse - a guy who used to work for you remembering something about the technical specs of a proprietary machine he worked on and using that memory to guide his research for his new employer, or the same guy actually stealing one of the machines for his new employer to study? I think our author might agree that the latter is the more damaging scenario! In any event, there's nothing to say that he would disagree with it, right?

Let me know if that clears things up!