LEGL 2700 Lecture 10: Patents and Trade Secrets
2 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Intellectual property rights give incentives to innovate: sources of intellectual property law. Congress has passed additional statues and legislation. For trademarks and trade secrets: judges made law first and then congress followed. Any form of knowledge or information that has economic value from not being generally known to others, or readily ascertainable by proper means and has been subject of reasonable efforts by the owner to maintain secrecy. To protect information as a trade secret, the information must actually be secret, and the business must take reasonable measures to keep it so. To be liable in a trade secret case, a defendant must have misappropriated the information in question. Misappropriation obviously occurs when one improperly acquires secret information through burglary, espionage, or computer hacking. Also occurs when one discloses information that one had a duty to keep secret, even if the original acquisition was proper: requirements: 1) you must show that you"ve taken reasonable measures to keep your secret.
