this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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if they find your patent, it will be their direct blueprint to copying it. My last company preferred trade secrets over patents for this reason.
How does trade secrets work?
You don't tell anyone. This is more relevant for things that aren't easily reverse engineered, such as recipes, high tech methods, software, etc.
In order to be granted a patent, the government requires that you explicitly detail how to create or perform whatever your patent is over in extreme detail so that anyone in the relevant industry can recreate it after the patent expires.
Patents expire after 20 years, but you have a guaranteed monopoly protected by the government.
Trade secrets grant no legal protection (sorta, it's complicated). It's literally just keeping things secret to prevent knockoffs. The trade off is that if someone reverse engineers your thing, you have no legally protected monopoly. So your advantage can last a few months (if reverse engineered) or well beyond the 20 years that would've been offered by a patent.
Some things are tightly regulated though, so it's impossible to operate with secrets - think drug manufacturing.
Trade secrets don't get patented. They rely on the secret for protection. Part if the patent process is detailing exactly what and how the invention works.
Other side enters into an agreement with you that it will maintain secrecy over your technology. In other words, your invention is protected via contract.
Well, you keep things secret, like the full formula for Coca Cola
It works because part of the patenting process requires full exposure of how your patent works. Which basically makes it very easy to steal if the thief has no regard for Intellectual Property law
It's a secret.
lol yep, you don't publicize your secret sauce, you can do NDAs for your employees and partners. We were a small company and had a vested interest in the products success so no one squealed, but NDAs and severance agreements can assist even if they don't prevent it 100% but still, a better chance than public information
I’ve read about manufacturing different parts of your product at different manufacturers and assembling at your plant, so no one knows the final product or who are they working for, and it’s more difficult to copy, but that method seems kinda difficult for a startup.
They don’t work you can reverse engineer anything. You just can’t steal it you can copy anything it’s just how you copy it. Like if you work there and then copy it yourself you can’t do that but you can buy their product take it apart and copy it that is legal and valid and companies do that
The question you’re probably missing is why are trade secrets better. Because when you file a patent, it must include all the detail necessary to reproduce the idea, not just disclosing the idea but also how to make it.
Usually the complexity in a thing is not the thing itself, but the way it is made, so if the method of making it remains a secret, it is much more difficult to copy.
A good implementation example is the Phillips screw. They weren’t the first to think of it and anyone looking at it would be able to copy it. The ingenuity was that they were the first to come up with a way to manufacture them cheaply. I don’t know if they patented that method, but if they did, then the method would be exposed to all. Or if they kept it a trade secret, others would have to figure it out on their own, which is harder and more expensive.