The Latest from Tangibly

Five lobstermen are suing The State of Maine after the State required federally registered lobster boats to use devices that track the position of the boats 24/7.

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Tangibly is launching a free trial of its AI-enabled Patent X-Ray™ analysis tool!

The tool allows you to input a patent number such as a granted patent or published patent application, and it will identify potential trade secrets within or adjacent to the patent.  It’s a pretty amazing way to identify your trade secrets quickly and easily.

In a typical patent workflow, an invention disclosure is reviewed and a binary decision is made – proceed to patenting and disclose everything, or keep it as a trade secret and disclose nothing. This is an “all or nothing” decision – go down one road or the other. With PXR, you can make much finer nuanced decisions that were difficult or probably impossible before.

Non-compete agreements limit the ability of departing workers to go to a competing company. The agreements vary widely in coverage. Some define competing companies very broadly, and some have a specific list of companies.

Many life sciences companies now prefer to keep their R&D data and diagnostic information as trade secrets, rather than risk their patents being declared ineligible or unenforceable. This trend is particularly evident with data-driven innovations, where trade secrets often provide better protection than patents. In a recent article over at IAM titled Trade Secret Litigation Soars in the Life Sciences Industry, authors Tom Wintner , Nick Armington and Christina Scott (October, 02 2023) have some insight into this new frontier.

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How many times have you told an inventor “Let’s not patent your idea, but we’ll keep it a trade secret”?  This is immediately followed by dropping the idea into a deep dark hole, never to be seen again…This is not how you treat valuable company assets! Team Tangibly has been active attending conferences worldwide, evangelizing about the growing importance of trade secrets and how they must be handled with the love and respect that they deserve. Here’s some of what we’ve learned….

Cruise ships can’t possibly have trade secrets, right? They do, as recently demonstrated in Finland. A worker left his job at a shipyard that manufactures cruise ships, and took thousands of files as he was leaving.

The food & beverage sector is loaded with trade secrets – complex recipes and manufacturing processes can be fantastic trade secrets if they are difficult or impossible to reverse engineer. Courts recognize that drink recipes such as beer are protectable trade secrets…

If you can evergreen with patents, why not with trade secrets too?

In the patent world “evergreening” is a strategy of filing additional patent applications over time to ‘extend’ the patent protection of a valuable core technology. The pharmaceutical industry is the most well-known user of evergreening, although the mobile phone industry is rapidly adopting this strategy as well.

I love the expression “perfect is the enemy of good”. This means that if you insist on everything being absolutely perfect, nothing will actually get done including perfectly good improvements. The expression goes back to at least 1772 in a poem “La Begueule” by Voltaire. While the poem certainly wasn’t about confidential information and trade secrets, the expression applies perfectly.

We’ve seen trade secrets in fishing gear, coffee lip balm, and NBA strategies, but never on snow bikes…oh, wait…

In 2015, Polaris purchased Timbersled Products Inc., maker of snow bike conversion kits. The kits convert a dirt bike into a snow bike. Allen Mangum was the owner/seller of Timbersled, and was retained by Polaris after the acquisition.

Just yesterday (21 August 2023), the Knicks sued the Raptors, their head coach, and a member of the Knicks’ video team. The video team employee sent thousands of video files and other confidential information to the Raptors coach before joining the other team.

The information included scouting reports, play frequency reports, a prep book, and a link to third-party licensed software.

An update on the Balmuccino v. Starbucks trade secret dispute: You may remember that Balmuccino sued Starbucks for trade secret misappropriation of their coffee flavored lip gloss, but the case was dismissed in California for lack of jurisdiction.

Tim Londergan, founder of Tangibly, shares his journey of enlightenment in the world of intellectual property. Initially focused solely on trade secrets, customer feedback and market trends led to the development of Patent X-Ray, a tool predicting underlying trade secrets in patents.

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This recent case is interesting, not because a departing employee took thousands of files with him to his new employer, but rather how he was discovered!

They used personal email addresses to hide their employment status.  Beta testers had to agree to T&Cs including confidentiality, non-use, non-disclosure, and reverse engineering restrictions.

Dr. You had access to BPA-free can coating technologies while she worked at Coca-Cola and Eastman Chemical.  She took the technology to China and used it to set up a new company with Chinese partner Weihai Jinhong Group.

where a plaintiff files a trade secret misappropriation case without sufficient (or any) evidence of wrongdoing

The Act requires the President to report to Congress annually on foreign entities who engage in trade secret theft

A shipping pallet company declared bankruptcy, and sold its assets (including trade secrets) for USD $5 million.  Former employees quickly set up a competing company.

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