Utilizing Trade Secrets - Stratford Group Ltd.

Are trade secrets part of your IP strategy? As we move away from hardware-heavy innovations, trade secret protection has become an advantageous and cost-effective means of protecting your IP…if done correctly and under the right circumstances. Are you taking advantage of the universal and long-lasting protection of trade secrets?

Have you heard?…

Trade secrets are the best-kept secrets of the Intellectual Property (IP) industry!

In the days of hardware-heavy innovations, it was difficult to protect the ideas with trade secrets, since it is not illegal to reverse-engineer a product. Anyone could bring a product to an expert in reverse engineering and uncover one or more of the innovations that were not protected by patents in order to use them freely in other countries.

As innovation moves to the cloud, for example Software as a Service (SaaS), reverse engineering cannot be done legally, as it would require hacking a secure server.

Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe

Protecting your IP with trade secrets can become an option if you take the following active measures to keep it a secret:

• proper encryption of the secret on the server;
• appropriate access security measures are in place;
• use a server which records access logs to track and take actions against hackers;
• log trade secrets through a proper invention disclosure process, without the technical details;
• limit and track who has access to the secret internally; and
• if a trade secret inventor leaves the company, put them on notice against use or disclosure of trade secrets.

There are pros and cons to keeping something a trade secret versus patenting it and careful consideration of all aspects of a given innovation need to be taken into account before deciding to keep it a secret.

Secret Advantage

Some advantages of keeping your innovation a trade secret include:

• cost-effectiveness of keeping a proper log;
• worldwide protection;
• kept from the public so it is more difficult to copy or create something similar; and
• commercial value if it is properly managed and catalogued.

If your trade secret becomes publicly disclosed during accidental or legal/illegal reverse engineering, the worldwide protection would be gone and the innovation would be free for everyone to use. However, the upside to this is you may now have a first-to-market advantage!

Remember a patent application becomes public 18 months after filing, at which point, it is free to use in any countries you cannot afford to or chose not to protect it in. However, an issued patent application provides a solid defensive (and offensive) asset.

You May Also Be Interested In:

• Our Lips Are Sealed: Trade Secrets
• Can You Afford Not To Protect Your Intellectual Property?
• 10 Questions a Board Member Should Ask About Intellectual Property for their Company
• Protecting Your IP – Better Safe than Sorry
• Stratford Works with AI Firm Zighra on Hard-Hitting IP Strategy

Natalie Giroux is a pragmatic achiever with extensive experience in the areas of strategic intellectual property management, network performance engineering, traffic management, technical due diligence. She has been with Stratford  for over eight years and has been providing strategic virtual IP management services for several small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). She is passionate about maximizing the value of innovation. To learn more, contact Natalie.

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.