TRADE SECRETS

Trade Secrets are a fourth type of Intellectual Property, besides patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Trade Secrets consist of information and can include formulas, patterns, compilations, programs,
devices, methods, techniques, or processes, customer lists, sensitive marketing information, unpatented
inventions, and business information that can give competitive edge to a business. These must be used
in business and they must give their owner an opportunity to have economic advantage over
competitors that dont have this information in order to meet the most common definition of a trade
secret.
The United States is obligated to provide trade secret protection thanks to its membership of the World
Trade organization, and to its participation on the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS.) TRIPS requires member nations to provide a means for protecting information
that is secret, commercially valuable because it is secret, and subject to reasonable steps to keep it
secret. (USPTO) The United States provides this protection under State Laws, there are no federal
statutory grants of rights, and even though laws are different from state to state they are nevertheless
similar because almost all states have adopted some form of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

In 1979 law commissioners finished the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) to condense the law of theft
of trade secrets. Florida adopted UTSA in its entirety in 1988, including the 1985 amendments to UTSA.
The Florida Uniform Trade Secret Act (FUTSA) is located in chapter 688 of title XXXIX of the 2007 Florida
Statutes, and is codified in the statutes F.S. 688.001-688.009. FUTSA is largely identical to UTSA, and
like it, FUTSA prohibits misappropriation of trade secrets and provides certain remedies.
Under FUTSAs definition of a trade secret four requirements must be met in order to be afforded
protection. First, the information has to have independent economic value. The owner of the trade
secret typically establishes this value through substantive evidence, and it can be time, money, and/or
effort spent in developing the trade secret. Second, the trade secret must derive economic value from
not being generally known by others who could benefit economically from this knowledge. Third, this
information must not be readily ascertainable by proper means to others who can benefit
economically from this knowledge. Finally the information has to be subject to efforts to maintain its
secrecy.