Posts Tagged: "secrecy requirement"

What is a Confidentiality Agreement and Why are they So Important?

A Confidentiality Agreement, which is also known as non-disclosure agreement or simply as an NDA, is simply a contract between two or more parties where the subject of the agreement is a promise that information conveyed will be maintained in secrecy… These types of agreements are particularly useful when one is disclosing information that is valuable so long as secrecy is maintained (i.e., a trade secret), which can include both invention related information and business related information.

Your Secret Sauce is at Risk from Attack

In July, Kilpatrick Townsend and Ponemon Institute released their findings from The Cybersecurity Risk to Knowledge Assets study, which confirmed most companies’ worst fears — their intellectual property is at risk every day, and theft is rampant. The 600 survey respondents also disclosed that most companies are unsophisticated when it comes to identifying their key intellectual property (particularly trade secrets) and protecting that adequately. And, most surprisingly, the expected costs associated with loss of these important assets was estimated by nearly seven out of ten respondents to total more than $100 million.

Five Things to Know About the Defend Trade Secrets Act

On April 27, 2016, Congress passed the Defend Trade Secrets Act (“DTSA”), which President Obama is scheduled to sign later today. The DTSA extends the current Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (“EEA), which criminalizes trade secret thefts, to the civil arena. This means for the first time, trade secret owners can now bring suits in federal district courts, without having to resort to another basis for jurisdiction, such as the ill-fitting Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. While not without critics, the DTSA is a major step forward in the protection of intellectual property in the United States, not least because federal law now fully recognizes four types of intellectual property (patents, copyrights, and trademarks). This article highlights five important things that every trade secret owner should know, which includes almost every company in the U.S.

The Trade Secret Value Proposition: The Secrecy Requirement

While normally no single factor is dispositive in determining whether information has been kept secret enough to qualify as a trade secret, the focus is on determining whether reasonable efforts to preserve secrecy were employed is of paramount importance. What is reasonable will, of course, vary depending upon the resources of the company or individual claiming the trade secret and the value of the secret being protected. Notwithstanding, the failure to employ any protection protocols would suggest that the information is not a trade secret. In other words, while what is reasonable will vary, failure to do anything to protect the valuable information will not be reasonable. Said another way, reasonable efforts to preserve secrecy necessarily means that there must be at least some effort to preserve secrecy.