Trade Secret
One can protect some types of IP as “trade secret” and most companies do!
Trade Secret
Some knowledge orIP that gives its owner an advantage over competitors and its owner keeps that knowledge from its competitors, so that they cannot benefit from it.
One of the most famous trade secrets is the secret recipe for the Coca-Cola soft drink.
In that case, by keeping the recipe secret, the Coca-Cola Company has kept competitors from copying its signature drink for over 100 years. That time span is far longer than copyright or patent protection would have provided.
To be a trade secret, there are two requirements:
- First, the IP to be protected must have value to its owner and its competitors, and only those within the company can know it. If the IP is publicly known to others outside of your company, then it is not a secret.
- Second, the owner must take proactive measures to keep the IP secret.
- This includes restricting access to only those who need to know about the IP and ensuring that those who do have access sign a NDA. It also includes repeatedly making employees aware of which IP is trade secret and reminding everyone of their obligations to keep it secret. The reason for the repetition and reminding is due to the difficulty in prosecuting an employee for breach of confidentiality when the employee can claim that they acted unwittingly.
With respect to software, trade secret protection is not terribly effective when it comes to protecting the IP and source code. This lack of effectiveness is due to decompilation technologies that can reverse engineer much of a program’s source code from the object code that is distributed to users. However, other software artifacts such as software plans, designs, and documentation can (and are) often protected as trade secrets.
In fact, the protection of most software is through a combination of trade secret and copyright.
In that case, if a competitor does obtain access to your code by using decompilation tools, they cannot use your code in their own products because it is protected by copyright.