Protection
A company can protect its confidential information through non-compete and non-disclosure contracts with its employees (within the constraints of employment law, including only restraint that is reasonable in geographic and time scope). The law of protection of confidential information effectively allows a perpetual monopoly in secret information - it does not expire as would a patent. The lack of formal protection, however, means that a third party is not prevented from independently duplicating and using the secret information once it is discovered.
Secret formulae are often protected by restricting the key information to one or two trusted individuals, such as the ingredients of Chartreuse liqueur. The drink has a unique taste created by use of 130 different herbs, and is known to only two of the monks at the monastery.
In the United States, trade secrets are not protected by law in the same manner as trademarks or patents. Specifically, both trademarks and patents are protected under federal statutes, the Lanham Act and Patent Act, respectively. Instead, trade secrets are protected under state laws, and most states have enacted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), except for Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Texas. One of the differences between patents and trademarks, on the one hand, and trade secrets, on the other, is that trade secret is protected only when the secret is not disclosed.
Read more about this topic: Trade Secret
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“We all cry out that the world is corrupt,—and I fear too justly,—but we never reflect, what we have to thank for it, and that it is our open countenance of vice, which gives the lye to our private censures of it, which is its chief protection and encouragement.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“... actresses require protection in their art from blind abuse, from savage criticism. Their work is their religion, if they are seeking the best in their art, and to abuse that faith is to rob them, to dishonor them.”
—Nance O’Neil (1874–1965)