Trade secret: an alternative to patenting

Case #9 - Slime that cleans

This lump of sticky cleaning gel grabs dust out of places like cup holders and the dusty a/c vents in your car.

There’s no real “structure” to patent here. In fact, the lump’s advantage is its deformability.  And a method claim to using a tacky shapeless form to gather dust hardly seems promising. After all, isn’t that what happens when you knead dough on a floured board?

The invention here lies in the material itself. With that being the case, a practical question arises:

“Why bother getting a patent at all?”

 A patent is supposed to protect against people who copy your invention. But you can’t just look at this material and figure out how to copy it.

 A mass spectrometer might help. It’ll tell you what’s in the material. But if there’s one thing you learn from reality-TV cooking shows, it’s that the same ingredients can turn into vastly different dishes.

So with all this being the case, why not just keep the invention a “trade secret?” A patent gives you a twenty-year monopoly in exchange for spilling your secret. But a secret lasts as long as you can keep it.

Of course, this is a bit risky. If someone manages to reverse engineer it, there’s no recourse. And as a product becomes more successful, one has to worry about industrial espionage, disgruntled employees who sell secrets.

Still, if you can do without the nice feeling of being a patentee, keeping a formula secret may not be a bad idea.

Disclaimer:

The O&R “Is it patentable?” blog is educational and provides general information about patent law.  It provides no legal advice or conclusions.  O&R uses publicly available information about the products described in these posts and has no relationship with the manufacturers, sellers, or distributors of these products.  Reading this blog and participating in voting on the case studies does not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader and O&R.