| 1.4.04 Trade Secrets Directive 2018: |
| 1. The organisation chooses to operate using the Trade Secrets Directive, rather than diverse Patent laws. |
| 2. Patents can be granted for only 20 years where the patented idea must be published for all to understand how to formulate similar benefits. Patents need to be protected in law and that can be very expensive as each breach of patent may cost millions and take many years to be resolved. Patents are used by multi-nationals to protect themselves with joint marketing agreements that keep out smaller competitors - monopolies must be protected by patents. |
| 3. Trade secrets are not published and so do not need to be protected with expensive legal procedings. Trade secrets such as a the Coca Cola formula never expire and can be retained for dynasties. The cost of keeping a trade secret secret is the cost of encryption methods that must be applied to all business data to keep it safe from being stolen. Trade secrets could be said to have no asset valuation, but may be traded using blockchain technology. |
| 4. Where a business is not a world monopoly, it may choose to protect its trade secrets by making them open software standards. While the business will continue to enjoy the benefit of its trade secret, other companies in the world may reuse the trade secret so it becomes a de-facto standard. A monopoly corporation cannot compete against agile companies using free open standards and de-facto standard methods. |
| 5. It may be counter-intuative to publish trade secrets as open standards, but if a monopoly corporation patents a similar idea, then that trade secret may become unusable and even a liability. A monopoly corporation may sue for backdated license fees for a patent that post-dates when a trade secret was first used by a small company. When a corporation like Microsoft, Oracle or Amazon has cause to demand backdated license fees, then it is expensive to try to defend and expedient to move to a different source of revenue. |