Buche & Associates, P.C. Trade Secrets & Unfair Competition

A patent is not the only way to protect your ideas.
The common law of trade secrets and unfair competition serve to protect those assets which give a business a competitive advantage and that a business takes reasonable precautions to protect.
Trade secret law can protect a variety of ideas-even ideas that may not be patentable. Typical examples would include customer lists, secret recipes, secret chemical processes, product sourcing lists, list of telephone numbers and business contacts.
The benefit of a trade secret is that it could last indefinitely, so long as reasonable precautions are taken to protect it as such. The downfall is that if someone figures out your secret by "reverse engineering" or other fair means, you can lose the right to prevent them from using the technology.
Based in San Diego, California, Buche & Associates, P.C. can help your business devise steps to protect intellectual property rights to non-patented, although valuable technologies. If litigation develops, we can represent your interests in any dispute involving unfair competition, misappropriation of confidential information, or trade secret theft. In litigation, the issues are generally whether the information was truly "secret," whether precautions were taken to protect information as proprietary, whether there were any unfair actions of the defendant, and establishing and proving the proper measure of damages.