Trade Secrets

Highlights from the Legal Guide: An Overview of Trade Secrets

CMLP Staff — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:00:23 -0400

This is the tenth in a series of posts calling attention to topics we cover in the Citizen Media Legal Guide. In this post, we highlight the section on trade secrets, which describes the limitations imposed on publishers who rely on or publish certain confidential business information and offers practical advice to citizen media creators on how to avoid liability for publishing trade secrets.

Trade Secrets

A trade secret is a form of intellectual property that applies to business secrets. If a company or other organization creates or compiles information that gives it an economic advantage over its competitors, it can protect that information as a trade secret -- in a sense becoming the "owner" of the trade secret. To do so, however, a business must take reasonable precautions to keep the information secret, and it loses its property right when competitors or the public at large uncover the secret. Trade secrets law is governed by state law. However, most U.S. states have adopted their own slightly modified version of the Uniform Trade Secret Act (UTSA), so there is a good deal of uniformity among state laws on the subject. For state-specific information, please see the State Law: Trade Secrets section of this guide.

The main goal of trade secrets law is to provide a way for businesses to capitalize on their unique practices or knowledge created through their time and effort. Unlike copyright, trade secrets law protects ideas and facts, rather than just the form in which they are expressed. A trade secret can be any kind of information relating to a business -- formulas, plans, designs, patterns, supplier lists, customer lists, financial data, personnel information, physical devices, processes, computer software, and a catch-all category of "know-how." The most "well known" trade secret is the "secret formula" for Coca-Cola, which has been kept under wraps for more than 100 years.

By definition, trade secrets are not disclosed to the public. In this way, they are different from inventions and creative works that are copyrighted or patented. And, in contrast to copyrighted or patented information, trade secrets are not time-limited -- they last as long as the company manages to keep them secret. The company that creates them has the sole ability to exploit the secret as long as it manages to keep it from becoming public knowledge. The catch is that trade secrets can disappear without warning or any specific period of time passing. Once disclosed, they're gone. In addition, trade secrets law provides no protection against someone independently developing the owner's trade secret information or reverse engineering it from a finished product.

For the most part, trade secrets law is directed against industrial espionage and ex-employees sharing their former employers' proprietary information with new employers. You might justifiably ask, then, what all this has to do with citizen media and online publishing? Trade secrets law prohibits publishing someone else's trade secrets under certain circumstances, and businesses and other organizations sometimes look to trade secrets law as a way of stopping the traditional and non-traditional media from publishing valuable, sensitive, or damaging information. Many readers may recall Apple's dispute with Think Secret, AppleInsider, and O'Grady's PowerPage over leaks of confidential information about unreleased Apple products before MacWorld 2005. Apple turned to trade secrets law to make out its case. Ultimately, the courts never decided the merits of Apple's trade secrets claims because Think Secret settled and ceased operations, and Apple voluntarily withdrew its lawsuit against the other sites after a California court upheld the website operators' right to protect the identity of their sources under the California shield law. For additional details on the lawsuits, see our database entries, Apple v. DePlume and Apple v. Does. Going back to 1999, Ford sued a website operator named Robert Lane for posting its confidential documents and photographs on his site. Current and former Ford employees had provided Lane with secret materials in violation of their confidentiality agreements with the auto giant. The court found that Lane had likely violated the Michigan Trade Secrets Act, but held that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did not permit the court to order Lane to remove the photographs and documents from the Internet. See Ford Motor Company v. Lane, 67 F. Supp. 2d 745 (E.D. Mich. 1999), for details.

If, like many people, your online activities are limited to synthesizing and commenting on materials you find online, then trade secrets law will not have any real impact on you. For a business to protect information under trade secrets law, the information must be secret. If you can find a piece of information by searching the Internet, then in all likelihood so can the company's competitors, and that information is not a trade secret. If, on the other hand, you engage in investigative reporting or regularly rely on confidential sources, you should familiarize yourself with trade secrets law in order to avoid potential liability and to stand up for yourself should someone send you a cease-and-desist letter. There are two scenarios where trade secrets problems are likely to come up; in legal terminology, this is when a court could find that you have "misappropriated" a trade secret.

Scenario One: You personally acquire a trade secret by improper means, such as theft, trespass, hacking, or breach of your own employment contract, even if you do not publish the trade secret. This type of conduct is outside the scope of this guide. If you are accused of engaging in such activities, we suggest that you seek immediate legal assistance. See the section on Finding Legal Help for some suggestions.

Scenario Two: You publish secret information received from a source and you know that the source acquired it through theft, hacking, or some other improper means, or breached a duty of confidentiality by giving it to you. This later situation could easily come up if you rely on employee sources for information about a company. If you want to rely on insider sources or are simply curious about what qualifies as a trade secret and what activities may cause trade secret liability, please see Basics of a Trade Secret Claim.

If you are considering publishing information that might be considered a trade secret, don't be intimidated. Not every company document is a trade secret, and a business ordinarily cannot stop you from publishing embarrassing -- but not secret or economically valuable -- information. Even if you publish a bona fide trade secret, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution may protect you from having to take it down and even from paying damages, especially if you publish the trade secret in order to report or comment on a matter of public concern. To illustrate both points, imagine that a source inside the XYZ Tire Company provides you with a secret company memorandum revealing a hazardous defect in the company's tires; you may have a host of legal arguments why publishing that information is lawful, including that the information in the memorandum is not a trade secret and that the First Amendment protects your activity. Keep in mind, however, that the law is not clear in this area. If you are interested in the legal protections the law may offer your publishing activities, consult the Publishing Trade Secrets section.

In the sections that follow, we lay out further specifics about the principles described above. This guide is not a full treatment of trade secrets law, but it does provide what we hope is a good understanding of the legal risks surrounding trade secrets.

Basics of a Trade Secret Claim

Publishing Trade Secrets

State Law: Trade Secrets

Crazy Legal Battle Between Newspapers Settles, But Leaves Worrisome Fair Use Decision Intact

Sam Bayard — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:49:31 -0400

Many readers are probably familiar with the meltdown of the Santa Barbara News-Press, a local daily newspaper in Santa Barbara, California. Starting in 2006, reporters and editors of the newspaper clashed with now-infamous Wendy McCaw, controlling shareholder of Ampersand Publishing LLC, which owns the paper. Tensions swirled around McCaw's perceived intervention in editorial and reporting judgments, traditionally left to the paper's professional staff. The controversy resulted in a slew of resignations and firings, chronicled in the documentary film, Citizen McCaw. The brouhaha spurred a bizarre lawsuit over copyright infringement, which pitted the News-Press against another local paper, the Santa Barbara Independent. According to the Independent, the defendant in the lawsuit, the case recently settled. While this might come as a relief to the Independent, it leaves a questionable fair use decision on the books.

The trouble began when Nick Welsh, an editor with the Independent, posted a copy of an unpublished News-Press article (obtained from an unknown source) on the Independent's website. The draft article, written by former News-Press reporter Scott Hadley, provided a fact-based account of the resignations of several key News-Press staffers. When the News-Press declined to publish Hadley's article and instead published a "note to readers" from Wendy McCaw, Hadley resigned in protest. Approximately a week later, the draft article showed up mysteriously at the Independent's office, and Nick Welsh used it to write a critical blost post -- Angry Poodle: The Poodle Barks Again. The post commented on Hadley's resignation and criticized the News-Press for publishing McCaw's "note to readers" instead of Hadley's article. Welsh included a hyperlink in the post that led to a scanned PDF copy of the entire Hadley draft hosted on the Independent site. According to Welsh, he posted the draft in order to expose and criticize what he saw as the censorship of an unflattering article.

Ampersand Publishing sued the Independent in federal court in California, claiming that Welsh's posting of the draft article constituted copyright infringement. The complaint included other legal claims, including a crazy theory that the Independent had misappropriated the News-Press's trade secrets by acquiring and publishing the draft article. For details on the lawsuit and links to court documents, see our database entry, Ampersand Publishing v. Santa Barbara Independent. The most interesting legal issue in the case is fair use, and the Independent asked the court back in September to grant it summary judgment on that ground. At the same time, the News-Press moved for summary judgment as well, arguing that Welsh's use was not fair as a matter of law. Despite the newsworthiness of the very existence of the draft article itself, and the clearly critical bent of Welsh's use of it, the court held in a November 2007 decision that it was not fair use, essentially handing a victory to the News-Press on its copyright claim. I would have blogged about this decision earlier if I had known about it, but I just found it today, so here goes.

On the first fair use factor -- the purpose and character of the use -- the court found that the Independent's use of the draft article for purposes of criticism was "transformative," but found that it used more of the article than was necessary to achieve its critical purpose. The court noted that another local paper, the Santa Barbara Nexus, had also published an account of the resignations relying on the draft article, but had only summarized the article's contents and selected a few quotes, without publishing it in its entirety. The court's reasoning, while not wholly unreasonable, disregards the fact that Welsh's objective in using the article may have been different from that of the Nexus. He wasn't simply reporting on the resignations. He was criticizing the paper for publishing "defensive editorializing" (his lawyers' words) rather than Hadley's unflattering factual account. If we credit the Independent's argument, as the court was obliged to do on a motion for summary judgment, Welsh used the article to set up a contrast between two drastically different accounts, and it is not clear that he could have achieved this contrast effectively without using the entire Hadley draft. At least in this author's view, it is dangerous to have a court taking such a narrow view of what is and is not necessary for successful criticism. The court's conclusion on this first factor also poisoined its analysis of the third fair use factor -- the amount and substantiality of the portion used.

Perhaps the greater blunder was the court's analysis of the fourth fair use factor -- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Here, it is hard to get past the obvious conclusion that the Independent's use could not have harmed the market for the draft article because there was not, and never could be, a market for a draft article that the News-Press had decided not to publish. Moreover, the news content in the draft article was stale -- the local and national press had already covered the events referred to in it. And, because of its critical character, Welsh's use of the draft did not function as a substitute for the original work, which is the type of economic harm that copyright law protects against. The court danced around these issues, relying on what looks to me like formalist reasoning wholly divorced from the actual economic realities at stake.

Admittedly, other courts have held that a plaintiff's decision not to publish a work does not mean there is no harm to the "potential market" for it, and the Supreme Court has indicated that fair use has a narrower scope when it comes to unpublished works. But those cases involved unpublished works that possess great economic potential (e.g., J.D. Salinger's unpublished letters, which would go for millions) or works on their way to publication (like Time's interview with President Ford). Here, even if the News-Press changed its mind and decided to publish Hadley's draft article, it would be worthless from an economic standpoint (and was already largely worthless at the time Hersh posted it). This case looks more like Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Inc., 337 F. Supp. 2d 1195 (N.D. Cal. 2004), where the court held that Internet posting of unpublished Diebold emails was fair use, in part because of the critical purpose of the use and in part because there was no conceivable market for the emails. In addition, in this case, as in Diebold, it is apparent that the reason the copyright owner was asserting copyright was to suppress criticism and commentary, not to protect its economic interests from a substitive use.

So, the lawsuit is over and the newspapers can go back to their business. But, because there will be no appeal to the Ninth Circuit on the fair use ruling, we're left with what I fear may be a dangerous precedent for cases involving critical uses of copyrighted materials on the Internet. Maybe the facts are too unique to make this case cause for much concern. I don't know, I'm still digesting it.

Making Sense of the Wikileaks Fiasco: Prior Restraints in the Internet Age

David Ardia — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:44:48 -0500

Yesterday, I reported that a federal judge in San Francisco had issued a stunningly broad injunction that brought down Wikileaks.org, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis." (I'll let the prescience of that statement sink in on its own.)

The plaintiffs in the case, a Cayman Islands bank and its Swiss parent company, probably thought they could slip into court in California right before a holiday weekend and silently silence a critic that had made them and their customers look bad. So much for that plan.

First, the banks overreached. They worked out what appears to be a sweetheart deal with Wikileaks' domain name registrar, Dynadot. Even though Dynadot appears to bear no liability for the material at issue, the banks added Dynadot as a defendant in the case. No doubt thinking they had come up with a legal "silver bullet," the banks and Dynadot signed a joint stipulation in which Dynadot agreed to, among other things, "lock" and "disable the wikileaks.org domain name" in exchange for being dismissed from the case (a case in which, it appears, Dynadot bore no liability). To give their stipulation the force of law, the banks slipped an order to the judge, which he promptly signed.

Second, the banks -- and the judge -- failed to read the First Amendment. If they had, they would have known that even narrowly tailored prior restraints on speech are constitutionally suspect. See Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 559 (1976) (cautioning that "prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights"). Instead, the judge did the unthinkable: he issued an order that is so broad I haven't been able to find a single example in the U.S. that comes close: he ordered the complete shutdown of the Wikileaks website. He did this not by ordering that the parties shut off access to the offending documents (that came in a second order), but by ordering that Dynadot erase the "navigation information" that directs people to the site. (Jonathan Zittrain does a nice job explaining how this works here.). That is like telling a newspaper it can continue to print its paper, but the delivery drivers all have to go home.

But the judge didn't just stop there. He issued a second order (again without giving Wikileaks an opportunity to defend itself) in which he ordered all of the parties, their ISP, lawyers, and anyone else working "in concert" with them, and "all others who receive notice of this order" to refrain from

displaying, posting, publishing, distributing, linking to and/or otherwise providing any information for the access or other dissemination of copies and/or images of the [banks'] Property . . . and any information or data contained therein, including on [listed websites or other websites they control.]

This second order is actually captioned as an "Amended Temporary Restraining Order" which led me to believe yesterday that the court had amended its first order that required the take down of the Wikileaks site. I've now come to realize that the judge intended no such amendment. I guess he felt it wasn't enough to shutdown the Wikileaks website, he'd add a second dose of judicial oversight to make sure things really went in the banks favor.

Which brings us to the biggest lesson of the day. Neither the banks nor the judge were able to effectively cutoff access to the documents at issue. While Wikileaks' U.S.-hosted site is still in limbo, users can access the material through its many mirror sites, including http://www.wikileaks.be, http://wikileaks.org.uk, http://wikileaks.cx, and http://wikileaks.in.

And the publicity has been astonishing, with the New York Times, Associated Press, and many others covering this story. I'll bet the hits on the Wikileaks mirror sites have been through the roof.

So much for the best laid plans.

(We'll include any future developments in the case in the CMLP's database entry: Julius Baer Bank and Trust v. Wikileaks.)

Court Orders Wikileaks.org Shutdown, Then Grants Limited Reprieve?

David Ardia — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:19:17 -0500

Last Friday, a federal district court judge in San Francisco issued a stunningly broad injunction that brought down Wikileaks, a site that is developing what it describes as an "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis."

The case was initiated earlier in the week by Julius Baer Bank and Trust Company, a Cayman Islands banking entity, which along with its Swiss parent company filed an ex parte application for a temporary restraining order seeking to enjoin Wikileaks from publishing or distributing copies of documents the plaintiffs claim contain "stolen or otherwise wrongfully obtained confidential and protected bank files and records."

On February 15, 2008, the court issued what it captioned as an "Order Granting Permanent Injunction." This order, which appears to be the result of a stipulation between the plaintiffs and Dynadot, Wikileaks' domain name registrar and web host, required that Dynadot immediately disable the entire Wikileaks.org domain name and account and remove all DNS hosting records.

Later that same day, the judge must have finally read the United States Constitution and then quickly issued an Amended Temporary Restraining Order that drops the requirement that Dynadot disable the entire Wikileaks.org domain. Among other things, the amended order enjoins the defendants from "displaying, posting, publishing, distributing, or linking to . . . all documents and information originating from [the plaintiffs' banks] which are internal non-public company documents and/or which contains private client or customer bank records." (I should note, however, that the original order is still listed on the court's docket and the amended order does not rescind -- or even mention -- the earlier order.)

As of February 18, 2008, the Wikileaks.org domain is still down, but the organization issued a press release through one of its mirror sites:

Transparency group Wikileaks forcibly censored at ex-parte Californian hearing -- ordered to print blank pages -- 'wikileaks.org' name forcibly deleted from Californian domain registrar -- the best justice Cayman Islands money launderers can buy?

When the transparency group Wikileaks was censored in China last year, no-one was too surprised. After all, the Chinese government also censors the Paris based Reporters Sans Frontiers and New York Based Human Rights Watch. And when Wikileaks published the secret censorship lists of Thailand's military Junta, no-one was too surprised when people in that country had to go to extra lengths to read the site. But on Friday the 15th, February 2008, in the home of the free and the land of the brave, and a constitution which states "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", the Wikileaks.org press was shutdown.

The court has scheduled a hearing on the injunction for February 29, 2008. You can follow developments in the case by going to the CMLP's database entry: Julius Baer Bank and Trust v. Wikileaks.

UPDATE: I posted some additional commentary on the case: Making Sense of the Wikileaks Fiasco: Prior Restraints in the Internet Age.

More on the case: Judge in Wikileaks Case Reverses Course, Wikileaks.org is Back Online and Banks in Wikileaks Case Back Down, Seek to Dismiss Case After Losing Fight Over Injunctions.

Think Secret to Cease Operations as Part of Settlement With Apple

Sam Bayard — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:17:27 -0500

TechCrunch is reporting that Apple and Think Secret have settled their longstanding trade secrets dispute. Here's the kicker: under the terms of the agreement, Think Secret will cease operations. Think Secret issued a statement:

Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides. As part of the confidential settlement, no sources were revealed and Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret's publisher, said "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."

The case arose out of Think Secret's publication of a report about a number of new Apple products days before MacWorld 2005. Appled sued the blog's operator Nick Ciarelli (aka Nick DePlume) and his company DePlume Organization, LLC for misappropriation of trade secrets in California state court and sought discovery of the identity of Think Secret's confidential sources. Apple's claim was unusual because Ciarelli was not an Apple employee and was not bound by any confidentiality agreement. Apple argued that Ciarelli should nevertheless be held liable because he encouraged leaks of confidential information through an anonymous email system and a voice-mail tip line.

DePlume filed a motion to strike the complaint pursuant to California's anti-SLAPP statute (Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 425.16). The motion remained pending for years, but the court did not issue a decision on it before the recent settlement.

For additional details and court documents, please see the CMLP database entry, Apple v. DePlume.

Chilly Weekend: Black Friday Prequel and Public Domain Music Scores

Wendy Seltzer — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:17:35 -0400

If it's fall, these must be cease-and-desists for Black Friday ads. This year, they seem to be coming earlier than ever, as Wal-Mart sends pre-notifications against future posting. I put my analysis into a Chilling Effects Weather Report

Meanwhile, Michael Geist has the low-down on the overbroad copyright demand (PDF) that has shuttered the International Music Score Library Project. Despite vetting all submitted music for public domain status in Canada, where he runs the site, the IMSLP operator got a complaint that he was making scores available to jurisdictions where they were still under copyright -- talk about misusing disharmony.

Not Every Cease-And-Desist Letter is a DMCA Takedown Notice

Sam Bayard — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:56:52 -0400

Today, the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse posted a cease-and-desist letter from MediaDefender to gpio.org complaining that MediaDefender's leaked emails had been posted to the site. The operator of the site, which subsequently moved to http://mediadefender-defenders.com (but not because of the letter), also posted the letter and his reply. His reply quite effectively points out that he and his server are in Norway and thus "it appears that your legal grounds for throwing letters at me claiming this-or-that is shaky enough that you might want to relocate."

This exchange reminded me of an article in Ars Technica a few weeks back discussing the reactions of peer-to-peer site operators to similar letters from MediaDefender. I meant to post on this article at the time, but forgot about it until today. The gist of the story is that some peer-to-peer site operators received cease-and-desist letters from MediaDefender and responded with blistering comments ridiculing the MediaDefender lawyers for their impoverished understanding of U.S. copyright law. For example:

[isoHunt's] formal response to SMR&H is filled with caustic wit and considerable legal expertise. "If Mr. Gerber is truly as experienced in IP law as his bio claims he is," asks the isoHunt administrator in his response, "why is it that he is incapable of composing a DMCA takedown notice as per USC Title 17 Section 512?" The isoHunt administrator explains that Gerber failed to adequately specify the allegedly infringing content as required by law. The administrator also helpfully provides a link to a valid sample complaint so that SMR&H will be less likely to send the improper information in their second attempt. The following is an excerpt of the isoHunt administrator's response:
"This e-mail serves as a counter notification under USC Title 17 Section 512(c)(3)(A)(iii) that you have failed to properly identifying links to content that allegedly infringes your copyright/trademark/rights (or, in this case, has something to do with really embarrassing trade secrets *and* employee social security numbers) AND you have failed to address your e-mail to the appropriate agent, namely copyright@isohunt.com, so I invite you and your clients to take a long walk off a short pier, since you and/or your clients might actually manage to NOT get something that simple wrong."

In closing, the isoHunt administrator says that the he will comply with the request if it is properly submitted. "Despite us being located in Canada, if you do actually figure out how to compose a valid DMCA notice, we will honor it," he concedes, "just as soon as we're done laughing at you."

Don't get me wrong -- I understand the widely felt animosity towards MediaDefender these days. But I'm not so sure that isoHunt's "considerable legal expertise" hits the mark here. The DMCA notice-and-takedown provisions, found at 17 U.S.C. 512(c), only apply to claims of -- wait for it -- copyright infringement. Now, I didn't see the letter that isoHunt received, but it's a good bet that it's identical to the one gpio.org received. Guess what? No claim of copyright infringement there -- just the assertion that posting MediaDefender's emails violates (1) the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; (2) the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act; and (3) the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. (This fits with Ars Technica's description of the isoHunt letter, which apparently cited "various sections of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.")

The letter requests that gpio.org "immediately and permanently cease and desist from posting, distributing or otherwise making available MediaDefender's trade secrets and confidential information, and provide us with written confirmation regarding the same." This essentially looks like a trade secrets case, albeit a complicated one.

The formula is simple: no claim for copyright infringement, no DMCA takedown notice, full stop.

My guess is that MediaDefender is not asserting claims of copyright infringement because of an important case, Online Policy Group v. Diebold, Inc., 337 F. Supp.2d 1195 (N.D. Cal. 2004). In that case, Diebold, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, sent DMCA takedown notices to a number of ISPs that were hosting leaked internal Diebold documents revealing flaws in its machines. The DMCA notices claimed that posting the company's internal email archive violated Diebold's copyrights and demanded that access to the email archive be disabled. An ISP and the two college students who were posting the documents sued Diebold, and the district court held that Diebold had violated Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which makes a copyright owner liable for damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, for "knowingly materially misrepresent[ing]" in a takedown notice "that material or activity is infringing." The court found that portions of the email archive were so clearly subject to the fair use exception that "[n]o reasonable copyright holder could have believed that [they] were protected by copyright." According to the EFF, Diebold subsequently agreed to pay $125,000 in damages and fees. Needless to say, there are some strong factual similarities between the Diebold leak and MediaDefender's troubles over the last couple of weeks.

There was no reason why MediaDefender had to send isoHunt a valid DMCA takedown notice under the circumstances, and the company's mocking response -- while amusing -- was not coherent from a legal point of view. This was just an ordinary cease-and-desist letter, much like the ones that website operators receive all the time in defamation cases. The DMCA gets a great deal of attention in discussions of online speech, especially in technical circles. This attention is warranted, and vigorous debate about this controversial provision of the Copyright Act is necessary. But it's important to remember that there are other legal issues affecting your online activities.

Dell Tells Site to Take Down Posting, Then Admits Goof

Dan Gillmor — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:40:13 -0400

Well, Dell Computer is learning about the web. See the confession at Consumerist, in which the company admits its mistake in demanding that the site take down a posting about its kiosk sales operation. Some things do change.