Take reasonable measures to protect all of your competition sensitive information, keeping your data and confidential information under lock and key, either physically or using unique login ID's and passwords. Control access and require anyone with access to agree in writing to limit its disclosure.
1
Identify Trade Secret Information
Trade secrets may include your business ideas, inventions, discoveries, marketing plans, customer lists and anything else that is not known within your industry, is not easily reverse engineered or independently developed, and that provides you with a competitive advantage. Before an invention is patented, it should be protected as a trade secret, for example. But trade secret information must be known to you and must be identified as trade secret, as confidential and as your own proprietary information to anyone having access to the information.
2
Obtain Nondisclosure Agreements
Employees, consultants, manufacturers, distributors, investors, advisors and anyone else having access to your trade secrets should be required to sign a written agreement acknowledging the existence of your trade secrets and agreeing not to disclose your trade secrets to others not under an obligation to protect its confidentiality. Other limits may be placed on when and how information may be stored, copied, disclosed and destroyed to protect your valuable trade secrets from public disclosure. These limits on use and requirements for protection should at least include those reasonable measures taken to protect such information as is customary in your industry.
3
Obtain Rights in Improvements and Works of Authorship
Anyone having access to your confidential information should agree in writing to assign any patents and copyrights in improvements and works of authorship arising or deriving from your confidential information. Otherwise, a third party might own patent rights and copyrights protecting the improvements or works of authorship, making it difficult to use and protect your trade secrets.
4
Instruct Employees on Protection of Trade Secrets
Only employees that have a need to know your trade secrets should have access, and access should be limited to the information necessary for the particular employee. Upon hiring a new employee, the scope of duties and responsibilities should defined and limited access to necessary confidential information should be granted. Control logs, registers, confidentiality markings and login warnings should consistently advise employees of the confidential nature of information being accessed by the employee. Employees should receive training about protection of trade secrets during initial employee training, should receive periodic refresher training and should have exit interviews prior to terminating employment. In order to protect trade secrets, there should be no confusion about what is and is not your confidential and proprietary information.
5
Protect Your Network
Reasonable measures must be taken to protect any network used to store and access trade secrets. In some industries it might be required to store such information only on a network not connected to the outside world. Under other circumstance, it might be sufficient to protect information through unique passwords and/or encryption of confidential information stored on a system accessible from the network. Under all circumstances, access to confidential information must be limited to those persons authorized to access it, and any unauthorized access must be taken seriously. Any breach of security must be either prevented or promptly remedied.
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