Protecting Your Company's Intellectual Property: A Practical Guide to Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents & Trade Secrets

Trade Secret Protection Methods

Because the key factor in determining whether information constitutes a trade secret is the secrecy of the information, it is critical for companies to develop programs to protect valuable information. There are two ways for companies to protect trade secret information: physical measures and written agreements.

Physical Measures

Because all companies own information that is valuable to them that, if known to a competitor, would cause damage to them, companies need to implement a variety of physical measures to protect proprietary information. For example, to gain access to Microsoft's Florida office devoted to combating software piracy, one must first give one's name to an office receptionist. Then one is personally ...