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: Jorda on Trade Secrets

Are trade secrets nothing but ?baby patents??

Are trade secrets nothing but ?baby patents?? After incredibly derogatory and defamatory statements about trade secrets, which I have heard in the past, such as, ?trade secrets don?t have a single redeeming virtue? from a corporate chief IP counsel and ?trade secrets are the cesspool of the patent system? from a Washington, DC IP professor, comes the dismissive statement that trade secrets are nothing but ?baby patents?. This opinion was expressed in a recent meeting, which I attended, of West Legalworks in New York City on ?Advanced Strategies for Cultivating, Exploiting, Tracking and Protecting Your Intellectual Property,? by the moderator of a Roundtable Discussion on ?Choosing the Optimal IP Strategy for Your Company?. As I cover trade secrets, trade secret licensing and hybrid patent/trade secret licensing in my Technology Licensing course, it occurred to me that this ?baby patent? comment would be a good problem for the final exam in this course on December 13, 2007. I asked the students to write a brief essay on whether this statement is a correct or an incorrect characterization of trade secrets. And the students had a ball with this exam problem, to say the least. All but three students out of 79 disagreed with this characterization, labeling it a very narrow or simplistic view, or an oversimplification or even a mischaracterization or serious misconception. Some called it incorrect, incomplete, inadequate or even woefully inadequate or totally or blatantly incorrect or flat wrong. One allowed as how it was a ?misnomer of gargantuan proportion.? The three students who opined that this characterization was correct did so by pointing to Mark Halligan?s statement that ?all patents are born as trade secrets,? that trade secrets are a very important IP category in their own right and that patents and trade secrets fully complement one another.

Full post as published by Jorda on Trade Secrets on January 07, 2008 (boomark / email).