Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Academic Blogs -> Jorda on Trade Secrets

Academic

: Jorda on Trade Secrets

Trade Secrets and the "Best Mode" Requirement -- No. 21

In Trade Secret Blogs Nos. 15 and 19, I asserted briefly but categorically that the "Best Mode" requirement of the Patent Statute is no impediment to the coexistence of patents and trade secrets, because this requirement is a very narrow and subjective one as it applies only at the time of filing, only to the knowledge of the inventor(s) and only to the claimed invention.

This assertion calls for amplification and explanation, especially since the "Best Mode" requirement is such as entrenched bugaboo.

Conventional wisdom holds that, because of the "best mode" requirement, which is embedded in American and many foreign patent laws, trade secret protection cannot coexist with patent protection.  This is a serious misconception.  Tom Arnold, the founder of the former Arnold, White & Dirkey firm in Houston, is in full agreement when he states that it is "flat wrong" to assume, as "many courts and even many patent lawyers seem prone" to do, that "because the patent statute requires a best mode disclosure, patents necessarily disclose or preempt all the trade secrets that are useful in the practice of the invention."

Full post as published by Jorda on Trade Secrets on September 30, 2008 (boomark / email).