1. Patents and trade secrets are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary.<\/p>\n
2. If you don’t have any way to detect infringement of a patent, you should consider keeping your invention secret and not patent it. <\/p>\n
3. One way to protect trade secrets is to “split up” the information among employees so very few individuals have the complete picture.\u00a0 This might be hard to implement as a practical matter. <\/p>\n
4. Failed mergers and acquisitions present significant risk of trade secret misappropriation. <\/p>\n
5. Be careful not to disclose trade secrets to third parties without a non-disclosure agreement or without marking it “confidential” or “trade secret.” <\/p>\n
6. In due diligence, be sure to keep careful track of confidential information and trade secrets that are disclosed so you can get them back if the deal fails. <\/p>\n
7. If you were the suitor in a proposed acquisition, you need to be sure any new developments after the acquisition fails are not tainted by confidential information or trade secrets disclosed by the target. <\/p>\n
8. When trade secrets are kept in a repository it is best to track access to that repository. <\/p>\n
9. Recent decisions concerning patent eligible subject matter could lead to greater use of trade secret protection in lieu of patent protection<\/p>\n
10. If the invention can be reverse engineered, trade secret protection is not a viable alternative to patent protection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. Patents and trade secrets are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary. 2. If you don’t have any way to detect infringement of a patent, you should consider keeping your invention secret and not patent it. 3. One way to protect trade secrets is to “split up” the information among employees so very few individuals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[113,138,25,17,137,29],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n