Peter J. Toren, IP Watchdog; The Fragile Nature of Trade Secrets: Clues from the Courts on How to Keep Them
"Trade secrets have become an increasingly valuable asset to many
companies, but compared to other types of intellectual property,
including patents, copyrights and trademarks, they are extremely
“fragile,” and require that an owner undertake as many steps as possible
to protect their information and be vigilant about the need to protect
such information to the fullest extent possible. The failure to do so
may lead to a court’s finding in a misappropriation case that the
information in question is not protectable as a trade secret. As
described below, it is very easy for trade secrets to lose protection
under a variety of circumstances, even where the owner has taken what it
believes are “reasonable measures” as required for trade secret
protection under 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3)(A. In short, authorities in this
area teach that the more steps a party undertakes to protect its trade
secrets, the more likely that a court will find those steps to
constitute “reasonable measures.”"
No comments:
Post a Comment