As a California business owner, you work hard to ensure your business stands out and that you have the cutting edge over your competitors. Part of keeping your business fresh is developing new technologies, services, operations, and products. All of these things are your intellectual property. When you come up with a new innovative intellectual property, you don’t want anyone to steal it from you and use it as their own. There are ways to protect your intellectual property and you should familiarize yourself with them because if your ideas are stolen, you lose your ability to have control and access to them. This means that you won’t be able to effectively make more money from them because you will have to compete with others that are using your ideas.
Using a patent or protecting your trade secret can allow you to safeguard your intellectual property. Each come with their benefits and their disadvantages, and knowing the difference between how they operate will help you determine which one is the best for your unique ideas. This article will specifically discuss what a trade secret is and how it works. It is important to do your research when it comes to learning about the best options to protect your innovations but to ensure that you fully understand how to most effectively keep your intellectual property secure, working with a California intellectual property attorney is a good idea. When you connect with a Los Angeles business attorney you will be able to have your questions answered and ensure that the way you protect your intellectual property is going to be appropriate for what it is and all the hard work that you put into coming up with it.
How Do Trade Secrets Protect California Intellectual Property?
The great thing about trade secrets is that if handled properly, there is almost no end date to when any other business has the right to the information. Unlike patents that only keep the intellectual property in the hands of the business that developed it for 20 years, trade secrets can essentially last forever, that is if you have the ability to keep the information under a strong lock and key. Almost anything you come up with can be protected with a trade secret like recipes, procedures, or products.
When handled effectively, a trade secret will remain just that, a secret that is aggressively safeguarded from anyone having access to it who is not authorized to do so. As long as the trade secret never gets out, the Los Angeles business that developed it can continue to make money off of it while no one else can. Businesses in California do not have to expose their information to any type of registry office or have to go through any type of governmental administrative procedures.
While this all sounds swell, the big issue with trade secrets is the lack of control and the vulnerability they have to be stolen. Think about Coca-Cola. Do you know what the recipe is for the vastly popular bubbly drink? If your answer was no, then you aren’t alone, because no one outside of the select few that are approved to know it has access to those ingredients and the formula. Coca-Cola goes to extensive lengths to protect their recipe and they have done a good job at it. Their efforts to keep their recipe hidden have also allowed them to make a fortune from it. However, if the recipe ever leaks, Coca-Cola would likely take a massive hit and may even have to close its doors because of the other fakes that would use the recipe to create their own knock-offs.
Speak to a California Business Attorney Today
There is a great upside to having a trade secret that is meticulously defended from getting out to the public. However, because of the risk associated with a trade secret that doesn’t have the protection from being stolen and used the way that patent protection does, figuring out if you have the ability to protect yourself against thieves by keeping your intellectual property secretive is an important decision you have to make. To discuss your intellectual property protection options, call the Leiva Law Firm. The Los Angeles intellectual property protection attorneys at the Leiva Law Firm can effectively provide you the most trusted Los Angeles business legal counsel. Call the Leiva Law Firm today at (818) 519-4465.
