Patents, Trade Secrets and Trade Names as Factors in Industrial Development

Dynamic protection of innovations through patents and trade secrets

This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of imitation by a competitor. We suppose that the innovation can be continuously fragmented into sub-innovations. We characterize the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the innovator faces a strict novelty requirement and can only patent a fraction of the innovation once. We...

Secrets of the Trade

President Obama has discovered first-hand how difficult wrangling the interests of a dozen nations can be. For six years, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been in negotiations and might prove to be Obama’s crowning foreign policy achievement. If the 12-nation Free Trade Agreement (FTA) passes, it will shape the future of economic development in the Asia-Pacific and cement the U.S. as the...

Protecting Trade Secrets in Canada.

Patents in the life sciences industries are a key form of intellectual property (IP), particularly for products such as brand-name drugs and medical devices. However, trade secrets can also be a useful tool for many types of innovations. In appropriate cases, trade secrets can offer long-term protection of IP for a lower financial cost than patenting. This type of protection must be approached ...

Expired Patients, Trade Secrets, and Stymied Competition

ANGELIC Secrets: Bridging from Factors to Facts in US Trade Secrets

The ANGELIC (ADF for kNowledGe Encapsulation of Legal Information from Cases) project provided a methodology for implementing a system to predict the outcome of legal cases based on a theory of the relevant domain constructed from precedent cases and other sources. The method has been evaluated in several domains, including US Trade Secrets Law. Previous systems in this domain were based on fac...