The Traklight Blog

Nothing good can be said of the coronavirus, but to the extend that anything like the slightest silver lining on the darkest cloud can be seen, we can take the smallest amount of solace in the fact that banal misdeeds seem so much lesser now than they did a mere few weeks ago, and in fact almost seem a relief in comparison to the other news we're forced to confront on a daily basis. In that spirit, here is a quant story about trade secrets that harkens back to a simpler time when corporate misdeeds felt like a relatively significant issue.

Gone are the days when people put in their thirty years at a single company and retired with a gold watch and a pension. Mobility is not only necessary, it's the preferred option for many people who hope to rise through the professional ranks more quickly than the old-school approach of waiting your turn and paying your dues. Such movement isn't a problem or most employees with most companies, but in some instances, there are questions of proprietary information that might walk out the door with some key employees without due consideration to protecting it, or even with it.

We don't often consider the role of intellectual property in international intrigue and espionage, to the extent that we give consideration of the real life existence and application of spycraft, but perhaps we should rethink how we consider the matter. After all, what is spying but the clandestine search for secrets and information, and the biggest corporations have seemingly as many to entice the corporate spy as governments do for their public-sector counterparts. It takes what can be the mundane in intellectual property and adds a dash of Ian Fleming and Graham Greene, albeit without some of the dramatic flourishes.

The new year is an opportunity for a fresh start in our personal and professional lives. But many still fail to tackle the intellectual property issues that their business could potentially have to deal with, resolutions or not. While you should be managing your IP from its inception, it's better to start late than never; here are some tips on identifying and protecting your IP for 2019.

In what can be a cutthroat competitive landscape, small margins can have a big impact. It's small differences that can help to set one company ahead of another in the marketplace, and every business is striving to establish its own competitive edge. While most play within the rules (or at least keep their malfeasance from public view), we occasionally see the legal battling that happens when one business believes itself to be wronged by a competitor whom they accuse of stealing their work or ideas or knowledge to get ahead.

Starting a business is a complicated process, and with any difficult and time-consuming effort, it is inevitable that a mistake or oversight can happen despite the best intentions. The long hours can leave you frazzled, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day to attend to every detail that you'd like.

For companies considered to be on the leading edge of innovation, intellectual property (IP) and trade secrets can be the separation between themselves and the rest of the industry. Obviously IP is incredibly important to every company, but for those that have cultivated a certain aura of innovative mystique, that privileged information serves as the curtain that hides the fact that the great and powerful wizard is pulling levers as any entrepreneur would.

Protecting your company's trade secrets and other intellectual property is vitally important, even more so when your company is one of the largest in the world. Top businesses don't stay on top for long if they allow their ideas and methods to walk out the door to competitors. And having a former employee take those ideas to one of the most noteworthy (for good or ill) companies in the U.S. is bound to make for turmoil and legal drama. 

Trade secrets are a vitally important part of many businesses. While patents get a lot of love (and rightfully so), it's often the special something that trade secrets represent that can set a company apart. Companies take great measures to try and keep their trade secrets protected, but it's difficult to maintain absolute security over long periods of time; as much as businesses might forestall it, there's a chance that you may be a victim of IP theft. And to this point, trying to take legal action against trade secret theft has been difficult due to a lack of comprehensive federal law. But with a new measure passed into law, protecting those trade secrets in court should prove easier.

We here have often cited trade secrets as the "unsung heroes" of the intellectual property world. Trade secrets don't get the same attention or coverage as patents, trademarks, or copyrights. Much of that certainly has to do with the secret part of that - after all, it's difficult to praise and appreciate something that we don't know about with any degree of specificity. We know that Coca-Cola does something that makes their drink so popular, but because we can't say what exactly that is, we chalk it up to an ineffable quality that  we'll never know. But just because trade secrets are an unknown quantity doesn't make them any less important to businesses of all sizes. And a recent Senate bill may help those businesses keep those trade secrets safe.