Talk:industrial espionage

RFD discussion: May 2016

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industrial espionage

SoP.--Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:37, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

• Collins 1 and Oxford 1, 2 dictionaries both include it as a main headword. Neither dictionary is prone to include SOP entries such as fried egg, Egyptian pyramid, etc.
• Cambridge 1, Chambers 1, Macmillan 1 likewise.
• Commonly included in specialized dictionaries of banking, business, commerce, economics, finance, management, marketing, politics, trade, etc.
• Compare of course the semantically related term trade secret, which could be considered SOP by some but is common included in dictionaries. — hippietrail (talk) 22:32, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

  Possibly in use at the end of the 19th century in our sense. Apparently in use at least from 1920 in reference to employer spying on employees, especially for their union activities. DCDuring TALK 23:50, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

• Keep as a set phrase. Far more likely to occur than other collocation that might more accurately describe situation where this phrase is used (such as commercial espionage or business espionage). bd2412 T 00:06, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

  Yes I only came across commercial espionage listed as a synonym in one dictionary I checked out of many. I didn't come across business espionage in any. — hippietrail (talk) 01:31, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

• Keep as per the information I've listed above as well as my native speaker Sprachgeful. I'm not sure it warrants three separate senses though. All the dictionaries I checked had only a single sense. But my larger dictionaries are in storage at the moment and may differ. — hippietrail (talk) 01:31, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

• Keep, of course. It does not mean spying in an industrial way. ---> Tooironic (talk) 10:23, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
• Keep as above. Donnanz (talk) 10:39, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

I was surprised that the ten-year slices of google book hits that I examined showed at most two of the definitions, most only one.

I am not sure that any definition should use commercial, military or any other modifier of advantage as the nature of the advantage seem ambiguous or difficult to determine or characterize. IF we retain commercial, then I think we have no choice but to include both commercial and military.

The labor-related definition has a completely different type of target and type of agent. It's use seemed limited to US labor-union and government publications (hearings). DCDuring TALK 10:45, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

• Keep at least using the lemming heuristic--see hippietrail links to dictionaries. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:19, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
• RFD kept per consensus. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:30, 14 May 2016 (UTC)