Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi, everyone! I’m J.D. Houvener, your host of the Bold Today Show. We’re here for the inventor, entrepreneur, and business owner, delivering your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place. While we’re still celebrating the FIFA World Cup in 2018, a once-every-four-years event like the Olympics, take some time, have some fun, and go watch some soccer.
This week, we’re talking about intellectual property law, exploring how FIFA serves as an example. Soccer, as an experience, serves as a good example showcasing various areas of IP. We’ve covered the core – patents, trademarks, and copyrights. Today, I’ll discuss a lesser talked-about part of the IP sphere: trade secrets.
In the realm of soccer, much like any other sport, teams are individually owned and treated like a business. There’s an owner, a manager, and athletes who are essentially employees. Trade secrets become crucial here. These are pieces of information not known to the public, economically valuable to your company and competitors, and efforts are made to keep them secret.
So, if your team or company has valuable, non-public information that’s kept confidential through contractual or physical means, such as encryption or restricted access, and employees or athletes sign confidentiality agreements, you have confidential information. In case an employee leaves and starts a competing business, you may have the right to sue for trade secret misappropriation.
Trade secrets don’t have to be groundbreaking; they can be simple information like customer lists, vendor details, or internal statistics. These seemingly minor details, not shared with the public, make up your company or team’s trade secrets.
I hope this has been insightful. We’ve explored all four main areas of IP. Tomorrow, we’ll delve into privacy law, now grouped into intellectual property rights, and how it might play into the FIFA World Cup as players become famous. Stay tuned for that. I’m your host, J.D. Houvener, of the Bold Today Show. Have a great day, everybody. Go big, go bold!