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An Empirical Look At Trade Secret Law's Shift From Common To Statutory Law, Michael Risch
An Empirical Look At Trade Secret Law's Shift From Common To Statutory Law, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
Like many of its unfair competition brethren, trade secret law developed in the courts of England and the United States. In 1979, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, affectionately known as the UTSA, was introduced. The UTSA has since become widely adopted - forty-six states now follow it. The UTSA did not represent a complete break from the common law, and there is a lingering influence of the common law over core aspects of trade secret law, even when that law conflicts with newer statutory provisions. Anecdotal studies have considered the continuing influence of the common law, but, to date, no …
A Failure Of Uniform Laws?, Michael Risch
A Failure Of Uniform Laws?, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
The Uniform Trade Secrets Act, adopted in forty-six states over 30 years, illustrates an important purpose of uniform laws: allowing states to adopt sister-state statutory interpretation when they enact the uniform statute. The case law of each UTSA state should theoretically apply in every other state adopting it, which provides an important benefit for small states that do not have enough litigation activity to generate their own substantial trade secret case law. This essay tests this purpose. It examines one small state’s opinions to see how much uniformity the UTSA provides. The results are somewhat surprising: the test state’s courts …
Comments On Trade Secret Sharing In High Velocity Labor Markets, Michael Risch
Comments On Trade Secret Sharing In High Velocity Labor Markets, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
This essay is an edited and supplemented version of comments made during the 2008 AALS Annual Meeting Section on Law & Economics panel. The comments relate to information sharing in high velocity labor markets such as Silicon Valley, as discussed by presenter Alan Hyde. The essay discusses four topics. First, it agrees with the principle that trade secret law does generally not provide an independent incentive to generate secret information. Second, it asserts that trade secret law in California is strong when applied to valuable information, and that "information sharing" in high velocity markets is likely primarily tangential to core …
Why Do We Have Trade Secrets?, Michael Risch
Why Do We Have Trade Secrets?, Michael Risch
Michael Risch
Trade secrets are arguably the most important and most litigated form of intellectual property, yet very little has been written that justifies their existence, perhaps because they differ so much from other forms of intellectual property. This article explores the history of trade secret law in the United States and examines why it is that every state has opted to protect secret information, even though such protection is antithetical to the policies of access associated with patent law and non-protection of 'facts' associated with copyright law. In this article, I examine four potential ways to justify trade secret law. First, …