Category: Trade Secret

Privacy and Home Base in COVID-19

Posted on by Delain Law Office

So. You’re being a good citizen of the world and sheltering in place. Your employer actually allows you to work from home and you’re accessing your employer’s information over your home-based wi-fi. You have a password on your router, a password on your local computer, your  and you have never seen a neighbor lurking on your internet system.

But now you’re accessing your employer’s sensitive and private intellectual property using your home-based internet. Is your home-based security sufficient?

My guess is that no, it is not.

Hackers love a challenge. And a home-based internet security system is usually not set up to handle a hacker’s attack. There are resources available on the internet to help you beef up your home’s internet security; the Federal Trade Commission provides these tips; here’s ZDNet’s article; Digital Guardian lists 101 Data Protection Tips; and there are other references available. You must be proactive in keeping your and your employer’s data secure.

The best advice, though, is to follow your employer’s internet security protocols. If they have a PITA VPN, use it. If they want you to use the Tor browser rather than your favorite Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari, use it. Be careful about email, especially email that can travel across the open internet; you can simply assume, de facto, that emails are open communication with the world. And if you or your employer don’t want something forever on the internet, don’t put it there.

If you want to keep something private, you must keep that something private. Remember, not everything belongs on the internet.

 

Why Do YOU Need a Lawyer?

Posted on by Delain Law Office

You’re forming a business. You need a lawyer because you need to do it right. You need the magic words that form the business you want to form in the formation documents (do you know what those magic words are?).

Or maybe you’re developing a brand for your new business. You need a lawyer because you need to do it right. Yes, a lawyer is expensive, but a trademark infringement action brought by a senior user of the mark you adopt … without knowing there even IS a senior user … gets mighty pricey mighty quickly.

Or you’ve invented something and you want to get your invention out to the public immediately. But wait; do you want to profit from your invention? You need to take steps to protect that invention. Do you know what steps are available to you? And do you know how steps that seem to be diametric opposites and never able to work together can actually allow you to effectively extend the term of protecting your invention? You need a lawyer because you need to do it right.

Or maybe you’ve written something. Let’s say you’re J.K. Rowling and you’ve just completed your very first “Harry Potter” book. You want all the protection you can get for that book. Do you know the ins and outs of obtaining and using that protection? You need a lawyer because you need to do it right.

Or you want to … ooh, ooh, ooh … start up a company that franchises its business methods and trademark (i.e., you’re Ray Croc) out to others. What do you need to do to start that franchise and comply with the state and federal laws that govern franchises? What business and legal models do you need to have in place? You need a lawyer because you need to do it right.

Or you don’t want to franchise, but you do want to license your intellectual property for others to use. How do you license out your intellectual property without creating a franchise? You need a lawyer because you need to do it right.

Or someone has handed you a contract to sign. It’s long and full of legal jargon. What does it actually say? Remember, lawyers use words differently than most people do, and it’s lawyers who will interpret any contract you sign that goes south. You need a lawyer because you need to do it right.

You need a lawyer because you’re in business and you need to do it right.

Delain Law Office, PLLC

 

Patent Secrets

Posted on by Delain Law Office

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla Motors & SpaceX, said during his interview with Wired Magazine:

“I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.”

The ultimate goals of patent and trade secret are the same: to protect invention. They go about it in completely different ways.

Patent is, by definition, an exercise in disclosure. The deal the inventor strikes with the government which issues the patent is that s/he can have a monopoly on the invention, but only if s/he discloses the best mode to make and use the invention, and only for a limited period of time.

Trade secret is, by definition, an exercise in secrecy. No disclosure is made, no governmental grant of permission occurs, but the inventor can keep the trade secret for as long as s/he can keep the secret. Some trade secrets have lasted for hundreds of years.

So yes, the patent system in a big repository for the dissemination of information about inventions. It’s designed to be that because sharing the information through the patent system (so the theory goes) sparks further invention. In the US (I’ll get to China in a minute), the grant of patent rights expires after really a very short time, enabling others to glom onto the invention and make it cheaper, though not necessarily better, than does the original rightsholder (generic drugs are a prime example of this phenomenon).

China is notorious for its lack of respect for intellectual property in general. Although they are trying to change this, the idea that someone can own a product of the human mind is simply completely foreign to that culture. Therefore, the Tesla/SpaceX decision not to patent its invention, but to protect the invention through trade secret, is a strategic and conscious decision. They want to protect their invention from prying eyes and infringers. They do run the risk of loss of the secrets through disclosure or independent invention, but they have done their risk/benefit analysis and made their business decision. It may be the right decision for them, it may not be; that will be determined by time.

IP Audit a Necessity for Due Diligence

Posted on by Delain Law Office

What IS an IP audit, anyway?

An IP audit is a systematic categorization of all of your business’s intellectual property, including but not limited to:

  • Inventions (patented and unpatented)
  • Copyrights (registered and unregistered)
  • Trademarks (registered and unregistered)
  • Trade Dress (registered and unregistered)
  • Trade Secrets (obviously unregistered)

This categorization, with a simultaneous search for areas where your IP may have “holes,” is done by an intellectual property attorney in cooperation with your firm’s management team; despite the word “audit,” this is NOT an accounting function (although certainly an accountant belongs on your firm’s management team and probably on the IP audit team).

Use an IP audit as due diligence when you plan to merge, divest, buy, sell, create, license, franchise your property. Also use an IP audit when there has been a shift in the law that governs IP.

For more information about IP audits, read Nancy’s article, published in the December 2003 issue of Les Nouvelles (the flagship publication of the Licensing Executives’ Society), The Intellectual Property Audit (.pdf format) or visit our IP Audit webpage.