A General Approach for Determining When to Patent, Publish, or Protect Information as a Trade Secret

Protecting your Invention Requires Careful Consideration of its Use, your Intentions, and the Marketplace.
This article presents a general and pragmatic approach for assessing the best overall legal and business strategy to protect an innovation. This approach lays out a useful road map for determining, from a business perspective, when should be protected under patent or trade secret law or published as a defensive weapon against future competitors. Before we begin we note two important caveats that go beyond the scope of our analysis. First, a company may choose to pursue a patent for "marketing purposes;' i.e., to impress potential customers, investors, and partners of the technology's unique qualities. Second, the analysis assumes some knowledge of the invention's potential financial returns, which, if they are totally unknown, may lead a will be few records indicative of prior art,-company to pursue a patent as a way of hedging its bets.