A Beauty of a Noncompete?

[SPOILER ALERT FOR "THE BEAUTY" - read no farther if you don't want minor spoilers for Ryan Murphy's The Beauty]

Not surprisingly, The Beauty is wild - a typical Ryan Murphy effort that bounces between being pretty cool and being quite the mess.

So when the world of noncompetes entered (infected?) the show, why should it be surprising that it was a moment that was wild and cool for this Exec Comp lawyer, and yet maybe a moment that was just a bit of a mess?

To wit:

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Ashton Kutcher's Vincent D'Onofrio's Byron Forst (aka The Corporation) (it's complicated) - Time to go, robot lady. I'll have the lawyers button things up.

Ari Graynor's Diana Starling - My work has power that you haven't even bothered to understand, and we're closer than you think. You pull the plug and I will take my talents elsewhere. And you will regret it. 

Byron - OK. Conveniently, I have this noncompete agreement that you signed right here that dictates that all patents and physical products revert to me. You walk out the door, you start from scratch.
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To me the exchange conflates noncompete covenants and intellectual-property (and other similar) protections. Isn't that sad? But maybe it's even sadder that that's what occurred to me while I was watching the show?

(One more point I feel compelled to make before I leave The Beauty. I find it disturbingly ironic that a show generally about a bunch of self-absorbed rich folk who can't stand being old or fat or whatever and so embrace an injected drug that can fix all of that is sponsored (at least on Hulu) by an injectable weight-loss drug arguably targeted at that very same group.)