Finally, other than various state law trespass and common law claims, the most common form of protection for software is a simple contract.

Trade secret protection has become an increasingly important part of the arsenal of protections available for a company’s intellectual assets.

So much for the case law. But what is a trade secret owner to do — both in the case and proactively before the case commences

As we have written previously, during the course of a United States litigation — whether, under the new, federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) or the older state-adopted Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA)

While companies are starting to better appreciate the role trade secrets can play in underpinning their intellectual capital, proactive trade secret management is still a very much neglected activity.

While not always possible given local labor laws, to the extent possible, the company should require the manufacturer to adopt protocols to govern a termination of the manufacturer’s employees

The outsourced manufacturing agreement should require procedures that limit access to the company’s confidential information to specific

While the laws governing trade secrets differ slightly from country-to-country, common among nearly all these laws is that a trade secret is any information that is:

At first blush an audit sounds expensive, distracting and unnecessary. Let’s face it, we live in the age of the long tail

As we have discussed elsewhere, a trade secret audit or assessment is vital if a company is to protect itself during the outsourced manufacturing process.