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Kent B. Goss

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The Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) was enacted in 2016. The DTSA allows an owner of a trade secret to sue in federal court when seeking relief for trade secret misappropriation related to a product or service in interstate or foreign commerce, and does not preempt any state law. A goal of the DTSA is to “provide a single, national standard for trade secret misappropriation with clear rules and predictability for everyone involved.” S. Rep. No. 114-220, at 14 (2016). For the majority of the time, this goal is upheld. Aside from establishing a relation to a product or service in interstate or foreign commerce, state trade secret laws are typically almost identical to the DTSA. However, if states trade secret laws do differ from the DTSA, they are usually in regard to remedy.Continue Reading The Defend Trade Secrets Act and How it Differs from State Trade Secret Laws

Use of an algorithm disclosed in a textbook in a different field may warrant trade secret protection according to a recent Federal Circuit decision in Masimo Corp. v. True Wearables, Inc., No. 2021-2146, 2022 WL 205485 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 24, 2022). In this case, the Federal Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction to prevent an optimization algorithm from being released even though the defendants presented that the equivalent of the algorithm had been published in a conference paper cited more than 1,200 times and in statistic textbooks since 1960s.

Masimo and Cercacor filed a suit against True Wearables and Dr. Lamego and requested for a preliminary injunction to prevent the plaintiff’s trade secret from being released to the public. The purported trade secret is an optimization algorithm used by the plaintiff on medical devices for measuring blood characteristics. Dr. Lamego is a former employee of Cercacor, who developed the purported trade secret for Cercacor and left Cercacor to found True Wearables (TW). Masimo’s preliminary injunction requested to bar TW’s patent application, which bears Masimo’s trade secret of the optimization algorithm as alleged by Masimo, from issuing.
Continue Reading Trade Secrets Not So Secret: Conventional Technique, New Application

As companies have pivoted to remote-working, it is increasingly important to pay attention to the risks of videoconferencing, particularly when trade secrets are involved. In a recent case, the Delaware Chancery Court ruled that Plaintiffs did not take reasonable steps to protect their trade secrets because they did not implement appropriate privacy measures on their Zoom calls.
Continue Reading Who’s on the Line?: Protecting Your Trade Secrets on Zoom Calls