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Trade secrets are regulated by state law, which varies somewhat from state to state. Most states have adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (USTA), which has lent a uniformity to this area of law in the different jurisdictions. Trade secret law may be a successful method of protecting business intellectual property not otherwise entitled to protection through patent or copyright law. We have recently been successful in obtaining such protection for computer simulations generated by expert witnesses, and have obtained strong protective orders prohibiting further dissemination of materials produced through the discovery process. Almost any information can be a trade secret, as long as it is not generally available, gives the owner a competitive advantage and the owner has made a reasonable effort to keep the information a secret. An exact definition of a trade secret is not really possible but some factors to be considered in determining whether given information is one's trade secret are: (1) the extent to which the information is known outside of his business; (2) the extent to which it is known by employees and others involved in his business; (3) the extent of measures taken by him to guard the secrecy of the information; (4) the value of the information to him and to his competitors; (5) the amount of effort or money expended by him in developing the information; (6) the ease or difficulty with which the information could be properly acquired or duplicated by others. A trade secret is a process or a device or information that is used in the operation of a business. It may relates to the production of goods, for example, a machine or a formula for the production of an article. It may also relate to the sale of goods or to other operations in the business, such as a code for determining discounts, a price list, a list of customers, or a method of bookkeeping or office management. The important concept to bear in mind is that it is not information itself that is protected, it is the misappropriation this information, obtaining it in a illegitimate, improper or unlawful manner by law. For instance, it is perfectly legal for another party to independently discover the same information, or to examine an item sold on the open market to deduce how it is made. Trade secret protection requires that a substantial element of secrecy must exist, so that, except by the use of improper means, there would be difficulty in acquiring the information. In other words the owner of the secret must have taken reasonable steps to keep the information secret, such as pledging others to confidentiality, in order to claim it is a secret.
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