Tittel: | Secrecy: the IP right most often used by SMEs | Ansvar: | Stefan Dittmer and James Pooley | Forfatter: | Dittmer, Stefan / Pooley, James ![](App_Themes/Common/Help.png) | Materialtype: | Artikkel - elektronisk | Signatur: | WIPO Magazine | Utgitt: | Geneva : WIPO, 2021 | Omfang: | S. 2-7 | ISBN/ISSN: | 1564-7854 | Serie: | WIPO Magazine ; 1/2021 ![](App_Themes/Common/Help.png) | 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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