Digital Health Entrepreneurship by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030127190
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Trade Secrets

Until recently, trade secret law was predominantly protected under state law. Recently, most states (except New York, North Carolina, and Massachusetts) adopted a version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) to help unify the law relating to this form of IP protection. The UTSA defines a ‘trade secret’ as “information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program device, method, technique, or process” that is economically valuable and not generally known to or readily acquired by others by “proper means,” and is the subject of efforts to maintain the information secret.16

A trade secret is therefore a secret, something that is not known by others. Trade secret protection can be utilized to protect anything capable of being kept secret such as a product under development (until a patent application is filed), or a proprietary database or software code that will not be published or otherwise made publicly available. Note that one cannot protect a single item under both copyright/patent and trade secret, as copyrighted and patented technology is made available to the public. Trade secret protection may not be suitable if the economically valuable information is subject to publication, readily reverse-engineered from a legally-obtained product, or developed independently by another company.

Provided that reasonable efforts are continuously made to keep information a secret, a trade secret may be maintained indefinitely. However, as soon as the trade secret becomes publicly available, trade secret protection ceases to exist. Efforts made to maintain information as a trade secret should be outlined in a trade secret policy, and may include restricting access to the information (e.g., locking a prototype away and limiting access to certain individuals; restricting access to computers maintaining the information, such as code, and/or via computer or network security), limiting the number of people who know of and have access to the information, having appropriate non-disclosure agreements and/or employment agreements in place, and marking any secret information as such.

A startup may keep some aspects of its technology as a trade secret, while pursuing patent protection around others. For example, patent protection may be sought for a wearable sensor while a particular software application (e.g., a machine learning algorithm) is kept as a trade secret.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.