Business Law Assignment

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Business Law Assignment

1
Trade Secret
Answer (a)
Broadly speaking, a trade secret is defined as any confidential information about a company
which resulted in providing a competitive advantage to the organization. This is knowledge
or information which requires the business owner to take reasonable steps in order to
maintain the information a secret, and it has an economic value for not being known to the
public (Varadarajan 1401). Generally, trade secret encompasses information regarding
industrial or manufacturing secrets or other commercial secrets of a company. For example,
Coca-Cola has a secret formula for manufacturing its soft drinks, and KFC has a secret recipe
for cooking its fried chicken (Hanah et al. 49-59). Trade secrets differ from other applications
of property because a company can have trade secrets in any design, process or method
that leads to providing an economic advantage to the organization. Information is
misappropriated while violating trade secret rights whereas intellectual property rights
make a person liable for unauthorized use of the property. The trademark is referred to a
logo or brand that establishes a separate identity of the owner and its reputation for
providing specific products and services.
Answer (b)
There are different ways through which a company or individual can preserve trade secrets.
For example, trade secret audit assists individuals in identifying the valuable information
about the business procedures through which the company can implement policies to
ensure that they protect the trade secrets through computer firewalls, vaults, non-
disclosure clauses, careful regulation of outside visitors or signing non-compete clause
(Klasa et al. 266-286). Organizations that wanted to protect their trade secrets can make
sure that the confidentiality clause must be a part of their employment agreement which
they must sign before starting their work in the company. The company should also identify
confidential knowledge-based resources and implement policies to effectively manage them
in order to achieve the desired goal of protecting them at any costs. While dealing with
prospective clients, suppliers or other business partners, the company must make sure that
they have sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreement which make sure that the trade