Who owns your knowledge?

Who owns your knowledge?

Ken is a process engineer for Stardust Chemical Corp., and he has signed a secrecy agreement with the firm that prohibits his divulging information that the company considers proprietary. 

Stardust has developed an adaptation of a standard piece of equipment that makes it highly efficient for cooling a viscous plastics slurry. (Stardust decides not to patent the idea but to keep it as a trade secret.) 

Eventually, Ken leaves Stardust and goes to work for a candy-processing company that is not in any way in competition. He soon realises that a modification similar to Stardust's trade secret could be applied to a different machine used for cooling fudge and, at once, has the change made.

Has Ken acted unethically?

Definitely yes, no question about it, but in that particular case there were tempting factors which  pushed Ken to do what he did; the most important is it’s not a competitor company. In the real world such a lot of such things like this happen and no one knows even if the proprietary company knew thy will not be as mad as if it’s a competitor company; for example Apple will not be mad if Casio violates one of Apple’s patents but they will be mad as hell if Samsung attempts to.

So Ken may see it from that point of view. But it’s still unethical as he signed that secrecy agreement and then he violated it.