TRADE SECRET
Trade Secret… The secret of a trade...
This is a confidential business information which gives businesses a unique and distinctive edge over competitors and those in its cycle. Every company, business entity has its specific business information that makes it stands out from others. It could be a formula, an ingredient, a process, methods etc. and these constitutes its Trade Secret.
The basic aim of having Trade Secret is to create a unique and distinctive idea of their business and prevent other entities from copying such ideas.
What makes a Trade Secret stand out is primarily from the fact that it is not generally known or readily available by proper means to people who can make profit off it, also from the fact that reasonable steps were taken to keep the Trade Secret in question a secret.
However, not all confidential business secret can be regarded as a Trade Secret, that is, for a confidential business secret to be recognized as a Trade Secret, there are certain requirements that must be fulfilled.
They are:
- It must be a secret and not one generally known among or easily accessible to people in that line of business.
- It has commercial value because it is a secret (money can be made because of the secret).
- Reasonable steps have been taken to keep the secret from being accessed. For instance, the secret is hidden in a vault and known to only two key employees in a company.
So, these requirements must be fulfilled in order for a confidential business secret to be considered a Trade Secret.
In Nigeria, there is no specific law that guarantees the protection of a Trade Secret, and this brings issues for business owner because by virtue of Consumer Protection, consumers of a product have a right to know what is contained in a product in order to avoid any form of contributory negligence.
However, a means to protect Trade Secrets would be enforcing a contractual confidentiality clause with whoever would have to know this trade secret in the course of production. For example, if you have a very nice pepper soup recipe, the employees of your pepper soup restaurant would have to know the secret and in order to protect your trade secret, you can make those employees sign the contract which makes them keep the secret confidential even after they leave your restaurant.
The law might not protect trade secrets directly, but they provide a form of protection through these legal principles.
Do you think the law should do more to protect trade secrets? Drop your comments below! It’s Knowledge Tent O’clock!
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