| Tittel: | Secrecy: the IP right most often used by SMEs | | Ansvar: | Stefan Dittmer and James Pooley | | Forfatter: | Dittmer, Stefan  / Pooley, James | | Materialtype: | Artikkel - elektronisk | | Signatur: | WIPO Magazine | | Utgitt: | Geneva : WIPO, 2021 | | Omfang: | S. 2-7 | | ISBN/ISSN: | 1564-7854 | | Serie: | WIPO Magazine ; 1/2021 | | Emneord: | Copyright / Immaterialrett / Patentrett / Små og mellomstore bedrifter / Varemerker | | Note: | Open access (CC BY 3.0 IGO) | | Innhold: | Most kinds of intellectual property (IP), such as patents, copyrights, trademarks and
designs, are rights granted by a government. But there is another right that depends
only on the choice of an individual business: secrecy. The law protects someone
who shares information in confidence with another, but does not require that it be
registered with any agency. If there is a dispute, the legal system will sort it out.
Trade secrets have been part of commercial transactions for centuries, as a common
and practical way for a business to maintain a competitive advantage. While other
forms of IP are carefully limited to creative works that meet a very specific set of
requirements, protection for secrets applies broadly to any information that is secret,
that has some commercial value, and that the owner has taken some steps to maintain
in confidence.
It is this breadth and flexibility of secrecy that make it so attractive, in particular to
smaller organizations that may not have the budget to build a portfolio of registered
IP rights. Every restaurant can have its secret recipes. Every beauty salon has its
customer list and knows the individual preferences of its patrons. Every furniture
maker has “tricks” to increase the efficiency or quality of the finished goods. More
recently, secrecy has been identified as a means to protect unstructured data, for
example, machine data produced in large quantities and used to fuel automation, or
algorithms, another key component of the digital industry | | Del av verk: | WIPO Magazine 1/2021 |
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