A company may avail themselves of trade secret law to protect their intellectual property. Trade secret protection requires that the relevant information is not generally known to the public and that a company wishing to avail itself of trade secret protection make reasonable efforts to maintain the secrecy of the information.
Trade secret law also requires that the trade secret provide an independent economic benefit to the owner and cannot derive its value solely from the information held in the trade secret. While trade secret protection does not expire, trade secret law does not protect against reverse engineering. Thus, trade secret protection is commonly utilized to protect secrets of a trade, which are not easily reversed engineered by the public, such as a recipe or a “secret sauce.”