Question

K company develops a super glue and without making a patent application decides to protect the formula as a trade secret. Belgin, a chemistry student at ITU, buys and analyzes the product and manages to make the same product by reverse engineering. Then she offers to sell the information and product to L company, K’s biggest competitor. K company files a lawsuit to prevent this. Is there any chance of success for K?

Answer 1

No there are no chances of success for K because as per intellectual property act it is essential to file for a patent to protect an innovation or idea from imitations and copy and incase of failure to do so, no claims could be made to do so. Since company K did not filed for Patent application and instead just protected it as a trade secret, there cannot be any chances of success for K because protection under trade secret only provides protection against breach of confidentiality and disclosure by any person inside the organization to protect competitors from knowing about it. Since Belgin is not an employee or insider of K company and has rather used reverse engineering to decode the formula, thus K company will not be able to protect the formula of super glue as a trade secret and will also claim infringement due to not applying for patent.

Moreover an idea or formula can be best protected when it is a secret and not readily available, however since the product is public it can be easily imitates thus reducing the strength of K's claim. Therefore there is no liability under trade secret law for reproducing it through reverse engineering on the badis of the information contained in the product itself that is readily apparent to the consumer.

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