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Striking A Balance: When Should Trade Secret Law Shield Disclosures To The Government?, Elizabeth A. Rowe
Striking A Balance: When Should Trade Secret Law Shield Disclosures To The Government?, Elizabeth A. Rowe
Elizabeth A Rowe
Earlier this year, Toyota issued recalls on over eight million vehicles because of faulty acceleration. Assume that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) requests that Toyota allow the government access to the data in black boxes on the recalled cars. The black boxes are operated by proprietary software and can only be accessed with special codes by Toyota. Assume further that Toyota refuses to provide the Black Box data to the government, claiming that it would reveal its trade secrets. How should courts approach what I coin these refusal-to-submit cases? There is a void in the literature and the …
A Sociological Approach To Misappropriation, Elizabeth A. Rowe
A Sociological Approach To Misappropriation, Elizabeth A. Rowe
Elizabeth A Rowe
This paper is grounded on the premise that sociological analysis can be of great benefit to trade secret law. More specifically, a sociological approach can improve our understanding of the social factors involved in the complex interplay between legal doctrine and compliance. As the first article to apply sociological analysis to trade secret law, this paper uses a group which constitutes the largest segment of the workforce, namely, Generation X and Generation Y (collectively referred to and coined in the Article as “New Generation Employees”) as a case study for analyzing how values and social norms influence compliance with trade …
Who Are These People? New Generation Employees And Trade Secrets, Elizabeth A. Rowe
Who Are These People? New Generation Employees And Trade Secrets, Elizabeth A. Rowe
Elizabeth A Rowe
Traditional approaches to examining the efficacy of trade secret protection in the workplace are often focused on technological and process based measures. Indeed, much attention has focused on the use of technology, by itself, to stem trade secret misappropriation. This Article offers a novel approach to the problem by incorporating contextual factors that might be important to trade secret protection and focuses on the people. It also, for the first time, applies sociological theories about employee theft to trade secret misappropriation. Working from the outside in, the Article examines first the reported societal effects on the values of those workers …
Rethinking "Reasonable Efforts" To Protect Trade Secrets In A Digital World, Elizabeth Rowe
Rethinking "Reasonable Efforts" To Protect Trade Secrets In A Digital World, Elizabeth Rowe
Elizabeth A Rowe
The very technological tools in use today that increase the efficiency with which companies do business create challenges for trade secret protection. They make trade secrets easier to store, easier to access, easier to disseminate, and more portable, thus increasing the risks that trade secrets will be destroyed. While secrecy is the sine qua non of trade secret protection, it can be difficult to accomplish. There is a tension between the need to keep information secret and modern technological methods that allow the information to be easily accessed, reproduced, and disseminated. In trade secret misappropriation cases, courts evaluate the sufficiency …