Fromer, Jeanne C. --- "Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory" [2011] ELECD 542; in Dreyfuss, C. Rochelle; Strandburg, J. Katherine (eds), "The Law and Theory of Trade Secrecy" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: The Law and Theory of Trade Secrecy

Editor(s): Dreyfuss, C. Rochelle; Strandburg, J. Katherine

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847208996

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory

Author(s): Fromer, Jeanne C.

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

1 Trade secrecy in Willy Wonka's
Chocolate Factory
Jeanne C. Fromer*


Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is well-known as a dark
fantasy in which five children win a visit to a whimsical candy company.1
Less conspicuous is the legal issue of trade secrecy driving the novel's
plot. Secrecy is not indigenous to fictional representations of the candy
industry, but is widespread throughout its real-world confectionary coun-
terparts of today and yesteryear. An investigation of the need for secrecy
in this commercial sphere raises fundamental questions about the role
of legal protection for misappropriations of secrets when actual secrecy
seems to be paramount and about the relationship between trade secrecy
and patent law.
Dahl's story depicts Willy Wonka as an extraordinary innovator of
candies. Early in the story, the novel's title character, Charlie Bucket,
receives a mere taste of some of Wonka's many creations from the descrip-
tions of Grandpa Joe, Charlie's grandfather, of `a way of making choco-
late ice cream so that it stays cold for hours and hours without being in the
icebox',2 `marshmallows that taste of violets, . . . rich caramels that change
colour every ten seconds as you suck them, . . . chewing gum that never
loses its taste, and candy balloons that you can blow up to enormous sizes
before you pop them with a pin and gobble them up'.3
In his depictions, Grandpa Joe is careful to stress that many of Wonka's
methods ...