Question

You have just been promoted to the marketing manager of international corporation. You remember in your marketing classes that intellectual property, specifically trademarks and service marks, are very important intellectual property that must be protected to ensure that your firm does not infringe on anyone else's marks. The courts have determined there are a broad range of trademarks and service marks. As the marketing manager, you need to be aware that parts of brand names or other forms of product identification may qualify for trademark protection. Then address the following:

• Choose any intellectual property, such as patent, trademark, service mark, copyright, etc. and define and discuss.
• Next, discuss when your company should protect this type of intellectual property and how you protect it.
• Lastly, search the internet and library, and provide at least one example of how you could pursue legal action if an international business committed an intellectual property infringement.
• Describe how this would affect the manner in which U.S. businesses would conduct business in that foreign country.

Answer 1

For me, the most interesting intellectual property that exists are trade secrets. While most trade secrets are recipes, devices, and techniques used to create products, some trade secrets can be customer information and business processes. I work for a cyber security company, and our customers and processes are definitely some of our highest value items. One of the largest problems with trade secrets are that they cannot be registered as intellectual property, so companies have to use different methods to protect these assets.

One way trade secrets can be protected is through legal agreements, like the Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) the company I work for uses. It is also wise to protect sensitive information by limiting access to it, and by issuing individual login information to each employee that has access to this information. This allows for some internal control over trade secrets, but of course, this type of intellectual property cannot truly be 100% protected. Until recently, only some states had protections against trade secret infringement. Because of this, the Defend Trade Secret Act of 2016 was signed into federal law to allow companies to file trade secret lawsuits nationwide

Not long after, a high-profile trade secret lawsuit was filed against Uber by the company Waymo (a subsidiary of Google) over trade secret infringement. Waymo claimed that Uber had stolen trade secrets from Waymo for self-driving car sensors – a suit that Uber quickly settled to minimize damages . While there are new protections in the U.S., foreign protections against trade secret infringement have existed for even longer. Since 1996, the Economic Espionage Act has allowed the U.S. Attorney General to prosecute for trade secret infringement. However, companies themselves must bring cases to the Attorney General in order to prosecute, and may require serious damages in order to pursue.