Trade secrets are intellectual property. The AFF explicitly rejected all forms of IPR, not just topical ones.

The justifications for protecting trade secrets have puzzled courts and scholars for over a century. 224 Trade secrets, though commonly labeled a form of intellectual property-often, the most valuable form of intellectual property owned by firms today 225 are radically different from other types of intellectual property. Because of trade secret law's unique characteristics including the requirement of relative secrecy, concern with the way a defendant obtains the secret, and the panoply of available remedies (damages, injunctive relief, even criminal sanctions)-it has proven difficult to elicit any scholarly agreement on the theoretical justifications for trade secret law and its place within existing legal doctrine.

Depending on whom you ask, you might hear that the justifications for trade secret law are best laid at the doorstep of tort, property, contract, or even criminal law.226 Trade secret decisions over the last century offer little in the 22 way of clarity.227 The theoretical incoherence surrounding the doctrine has led Robert Bone to conclude that "there is no such thing as a normatively autonomous body of trade secret law," and a separate law of trade secret is, therefore, unnecessary.228 In a recent article, Mark Lemley argues that trade secret law is justified-and best understood-not as a form of traditional property, contract, tort, or other extension of existing common law principles, but rather as intellectual property.2

Trade secrets are best understood as intellectual property rights because they not only promote inventive activity (i.e., by encouraging invention in areas where patent law does not reach), but they also encourage broader disclosure and use of information.230 The "incentives to disclose" rationale is not limited to trade secret law; commentators refer to it as an underlying purpose of other IP laws, notably patent. Patent law, for example, requires that an applicant describe her invention in sufficient detail so that one ordinarily skilled in the field can make it, and that the information be published. 23 1 Thus, anyone can read the patent, including other inventors who can use the information to improve or design around the invention. What is interesting, however, about the disclosure rationale in the context of trade secret law is that it is not premised on publication of a secret, and it appears to have greater significance in relation to incentives to create. That is, the incentives-to-create rationale has an exalted place in the patent context232 that it does not seem to have in the trade secret context-or at least, it is more controversial in the trade secret context. Some scholars, like Michael Risch, have gone so far as to say that, unlike in the patent or copyright contexts, incentives to create has a "very minor" place in providing a justification for trade secret law.233