Trade Secrets - "The Trade Secret Life of Illinois Smith"

Transcript

[Music] hats off to you and welcome to another adventurous episode of idea defense 101 how's it going today we are talking about Trade Secrets and I'm sorry can I help you you're Dr IP yes that's me and you're talking about Trade Secrets yes that's right well I've got some Trade Secrets of my own and there's a rather Shady character after them I'd like to know what are the reasonable measures required under the law for protecting a trade secret so I can sue him if he steals them well you've come to the right place confidentiality Agreements are a good place to start anyone who is going to come in contact with the secret should be required to sign one before gaining access they can be Standalone agreements or Clauses in broader Employment Development or Consulting agreements for example these agreements prevent the person from unauthorized use or disclosure of what they learn about the secret under threat of suit for breach of contract do you know this Shady character I do it's Illinois Smith G him how did you get acquainted with him well he's my son what Secrets stored on a computer or server should be protected using things like password encoding encryption or other types of locked access some some programs can make it so a file containing confidential information is not even visible to a user who does not have proper authorization the corollary for paper documents or physical implementations of the secret is to make sure you have physical barriers like a safe or locked cabinet you can't just leave this stuff lying around thank God I've got it all stuffed in this lock combination briefcase um did you remember to reset the locks from factory setting oh yeah don't forget don't discuss or publish the secret lots of people like to brag about their work but once you put it out in the open absent the protections we talked about earlier it's fair game for anybody no issue there hey there's nothing but Fedora lacker in this briefcase you don't you didn't really think I'd put my trade secrets in that come on why can't I say it I'll give you 500 bucks I'm not taking your Monopoly money Stanley Stanley well that's his name popets Illinois we named the fish Illinois time to ride off into the sunset folks we'll see you next time [Music]