Trade secrets and TRIPs solve
Mark D. Janis ’99, Robert A. Lucas Chair of Law and Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Research at Indiana University teaching intellectual property law, “Second Tier Patent Protection,” 40 Harvard International Law Journal 151, pgs 216, 1999, https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/543, Accessed 7-17-2024 by NT-RS
Second tier patent regimes unquestionably devote themselves to the protection of subpatentable innovation, innovation that falls into the gap between patent and copyright protection. But it is not the case that in the absence of second tier regimes, all subpatentable innovation goes unprotected. In the United States, state trade secret law can be used to protect that range of subpatentable innovation that meets minimum requirements of confidentiality and value. The TRIPs [footnote omitted] agreement imposes similar standards worldwide.3°4 Fundamentally, then, the United States has chosen to protect a limited range of subpatentable innovations through a mixed property/liability regime 30 5 built around a well-established concept of trade secret misappropriation,30 6 leaving the remainder of subpatentable innovations to the public domain.