When filing a patent, IP owners must provide detailed drawings, recipes or procedures on what the IP is that is going to be protected. Suppose you have invented a revolutionary widget... when you file a patent on your widget, you will have to provide engineers drawings or blueprints on exactly how you make your widget including materials, processes, etc.
While the patent you filed gives you positive protection for your widget, drawbacks of the patent process are:
- The patent is available to the public. The detailed information you provide could be used by unscrupulous competitors to bypass the research and development expenses you laid out to develop your widget, allowing them to mass produce it immediately.
- Your patent filing alerts the world that there is a new widget technology available, allowing competitors to react before your widget goes into production.
- A patent is only valid in the US for a term of 20 years.
- Patents can only be protected through costly litigation.
Let's look at our KFC example from my last post. If KFC filed a patent on the process it uses to make its chicken (including ingredients), competitors could make chicken very similar to that of KFC. Further, since KFC has been in the marketplace more than 20 years, their patent would have expired long ago, ushering in competitors offering the same product.
Trade secrets can be a better option than patents for IP owners with revolutionary or difficult to reproduce technology.
2 comments:
Trade secret protection can be hugely valuable, but it is certainly NOT always a replacement for a patent. Trade secret protection very often does not extend beyond one's own employees or those who have signed an agreement agreeing not to reveal the trade secret.
There are also times where you must consider a defensive patent to avoid some other company coming in and patenting something and then stopping you from selling the product any longer because to do so would be to violate the patent.
Definitely trade secrets are important, but they should be considered as only one of many possible ways to protect IP.
Yours are great points. Utilizing trade secrets as a form of IP protection would not be a valid strategy for a technologically simple product. It would be used for a product or process that is very complex and unlikely to be replicated. HP, for example has yet to patent its printer stylus. Since its inception, no one has been able to duplicate it (as small at HP makes it). Instead, competitors buy the part from HP.
Simple products, pharmaceuticals, etc. would be horrible candidates for this strategy.
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