Christopher Morten: Do Federal Agencies Have More Power To "Break" Corporate Secrets Than We Thought?

The prevailing wisdom is that federal agencies cannot generally disclose trade secrets and confidential information given to them in confidence by companies that they regulate or work with.  Indeed, the Trade Secrets Act (18 U.S.C. § 1905), passed in 1948, seems on its face to make it a crime for federal government personnel to do so.

However, in a highly provocative, but ultimately compelling article, "Publicizing Corporate Secrets," forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Christopher Morten of Columbia Law School argues that federal agencies have much more power to publicly disclose trade secrets than is commonly believed. Morten argues that the scope of agencies' power to disclose is defined by their enabling statutes and that, with many important exceptions, several of these enabling statutes do not, at a legislative level, prohibit disclosure of trade secrets or confidential information. Some agencies may have regulations on the books preventing disclosure of trade secrets, but he suggests that they could in some cases change those regulations without additional authorization from Congress, and that there would be far fewer negative consequences for them than we might think if they did so.  

On a very hot day in July, I interviewed Morten about the details of his argument.  The interview took place in the air-conditioned NYU Engelberg Center. Many thanks to Katrina Southerland and Mike Weinberg for arranging a space for us.  This was a fascinating, lengthy discussion, which I have excerpted below.  

Charles Tait Graves: Idea Submission Cases, Desny Claims, and Trade Secret Law

I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Tait Graves new article: Should California’s Film Script Cases Be Merged into Trade Secret Law?, which was recently published in The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts.  Graves is a partner at Wilson Sonsini and teaches trade secret law at UC Hastings Law.   

The article deals with so-called "idea submission" cases. The fact pattern is as follows. Plaintiff, who is sometimes called the "idea man" in older cases, shares an idea with Defendant, hoping for monetary compensation even though there's no express contract stating terms of payment. Defendant subsequently takes the idea and commercializes it without paying Plaintiff. (There's an excellent discussion of the idea submission cases in Chapter 4 of Elizabeth Rowe and Sharon Sandeen's Trade Secret Law casebook). 

At least in California, the Plaintiff-idea person will likely have two distinct types of legal claims in this scenario: (1) a claim for breach of an implied-in-fact contract, which in California is called a Desny claim; and (2) a claim for civil trade secret misappropriation, which since 2016 can be brought under both state law (e.g. under the California Uniform Trade Secret Act) and federal law via the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA). Graves recounts in tremendous detail how these two different legal regimes developed on separate ends of the map of California, in Southern and Northern California, respectively. Graves' thesis is that, even though these two areas of law have been historically addressed separately, they have a lot in common and can learn a lot from one another.   

I interviewed Graves about the article, transcribed below.

Deepa Varadarajan on Trade Secret Injunctions and Trade Secret "Trolls"

I wrote some previous posts about eBay in trade secret law, and in particular Elizabeth Rowe's empirical work. Rowe found not all trade secret plaintiffs actually ask for injunctions, even after prevailing at trial, along with many other fascinating findings. I would be remiss if I did not flag a characteristically excellent discussion of this issue by Deepa Varadarajan, in a piece that may have flown under readers' radars.

Elizabeth Rowe: does eBay apply to trade secret injunctions?

Elizabeth Rowe has a highly informative new empirical paper, called “eBay, Permanent Injunctions, & Trade Secrets,” forthcoming in Washington and Lee Law Review. Professor Rowe examines—through both high-level case coding and individual case analysis—when, and under what circumstances, courts are willing to grant permanent injunctions in trade secret cases. (So-called “permanent” injunctions are granted or denied after the trade secret plaintiff is victorious, as opposed to “preliminary” injunctions granted or denied prior to on-the-merits review. They need not actually last forever).

Response to Similar Secrets by Fishman & Varadarajan

Professors Joseph Fishman and Deepa Varadarajan have argued trade secret law should be more like copyright law. Specifically, they argue trade secret law should not prevent people (especially departing employees who obtained the trade secret lawfully within the scope of their employment) from making new end uses of trade secret information, so long as it's not a foreseeable use of the underlying information and is generally outside of the plaintiff's market. The authors made this controversial argument at last year's IP Scholars conference at Berkeley Law, and in their new article in University of Pennsylvania Law Review, called "Similar Secrets."

My full response to Similar Secrets is now published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online. It is called: "Should Dissimilar Uses Of Trade Secrets Be Actionable?" The response explains in detail why I think the answer is, as a general matter, YES. It can be downloaded at: https://www.pennlawreview.com/online/168-U-Pa-L-Rev-Online-78.pdf

Anthony Levandowski: Is Being a Jerk a Crime?

Former Google employee Anthony Levandowski was recently indicted on federal criminal charges of trade secret theft. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the indictment was filed by the U.S. attorney’s office in San Jose and is based on the same facts as the civil trade secrets lawsuit that Waymo (formerly Google’s self-driving car project) settled with Uber last year. It is even assigned to the same judge. The gist of the indictment is that, at the time of his resignation from Waymo, and just before taking a new job at Uber, Levandowski downloaded approximately 14,000 files from a server hosted on Google's network. These files allegedly contained "critical engineering information about the hardware used on [Google's] self-driving vehicles …" Each of the 33 counts with which Levandowski is charged carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

This is a crucial time to remember that being disloyal to your employer, on its own, is not illegal. Employees like Levandowski have a clear duty of secrecy with respect to certain information they receive through their employment. But if none of this information constitutes trade secrets, there is no civil trade secret claim. In other words, for a civil trade secrets misappropriation claim, if there is no trade secret, there is no cause of action. 

For criminal cases like Levandowski's, the situation is more complicated. The federal criminal trade secret statute shares the same definition of "trade secret" as the federal civil trade secret statute. See 18 U.S.C. § 1839(3). However, unlike in civil trade secret cases, attempt and conspiracy can be actionable. 18 U.S.C. § 1832(a)(4)-(5). This means that even if the crime was not successful—because the information the employee took wasn't actually a trade secret—the employee can still go to jail. See U.S. v. Hsu, 155 F. 3d 189 (3rd Cir. 1998); U.S. v. Martin, 228 F.3d 1 (2000).  

The Levandoski indictment brings counts of criminal theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. (There is no conspiracy charge, which perhaps suggests the government will not argue Uber was knowingly involved.) But the inclusion of an "attempt" crime means the key question is not just whether Levandowski stole actual trade secrets. It is whether he attempted to do so while having the appropriate state of mind. The criminal provisions under which Levandowski is charged, codified in18 U.S.C. §§ 1832(a)(1), (2), (3) and (4), provide that "[w]hoever, with intent to convert a trade secret ... to the economic benefit of anyone other than the owner thereof, and intending or knowing that the offense will, injure any owner of that trade secret, knowingly—steals...obtains... possesses...[etcetera]" a trade secret, or "attempts to" do any of those things, "shall... be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both…" 

This means Levandowski can be found guilty of attempting to steal trade secrets that never actually existed. This seems odd. It contradicts fundamental ideas behind why we protect trade secrets. As law professor, Mark Lemley, observed in his oft-cited Stanford Law Review article, modern trade secret law is not a free-ranging license for judges to punish any acts they perceive as disloyal or immoral. It is a special form of property regime. Charles Tait Graves, a partner at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, who teaches trade secrets at U.C. Hastings College of Law, echoes this conclusion. Treating trade secrets as an employer’s property, Graves writes, counterintuitively "offers better protection for employees who change jobs” than the alternatives, because it means courts must carefully "define the boundaries" of the right, and may require the court to rule in the end "that not all valuable information learned on the job is protectable.” See Charles Tait Graves, Trade Secrets As Property: Theory and Consequences, 15 J. Intell. Prop. L. 39 (2007). 

So where does that leave Levandowski? In Google/Waymo’s civil case against Uber, Uber got off with a settlement deal, presumably in part because Google recognized the difficulty in proving key pieces of its civil case. Despite initial appearances, Google’s civil action was not actually a slam dunk. It was not clear Uber actually received the specific files Levandowski took or that the information contained in those files constituted trade secrets, versus generally known information or Levandonwki's own "general knowledge, skill, and experience.” (I discuss this latter issue in my recent article, The General Knowledge, Skill, and Experience Paradox, forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review). 

But thanks to criminal remedies under 18 U.S.C. §1832, and that pesky "attempt" charge, Levandowsi is left holding the blame and facing millions in fines, and many decades in jail. 

Maybe being a jerk is illegal after all.

Inevitable Disclosure Injunctions Under the DTSA: Much Ado About § 1836(b)(3)(A)(i)(1)(I)

When trade secret law was federalized in 2016, some commentators and legislators expressed concern that federalization of trade secret law would make so-called "inevitable disclosure" injunctions against departing employees a federal remedy, and negatively impact employee mobility on a national scale.

In response to such concerns, the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) included a provision that is ostensibly designed to limit availability of inevitable disclosure injunctions under the DTSA. The limiting provision is codified in 18 U.S.C. 1836(b)(3)(A)(i)(1)(I), discussed further below.

The DTSA has been in effect for just over three years. My preliminary observation is that courts do not appear to view Section 1836(b)(3)(A)(i)(1)(I) as placing novel limitations on employment injunctions in trade secret cases. They also do not seem to be wary of "inevitable disclosure" language.

Recent Advances in Biologics Manufacturing Diminish the Importance of Trade Secrets: A Response to Price and Rai

Guest post by Rebecca Weires, a 2L in the J.D./M.S. Bioengineering program at Stanford

In their 2016 paper, Manufacturing Barriers to Biologics Competition and Innovation, Price and Rai argue the use of trade secrets to protect biologics manufacturing processes is a social detriment. They go on to argue policymakers should demand more enabling disclosure of biologics manufacturing processes, either in patents or biologics license applications (BLAs). The authors premise their arguments on an assessment that (1) variations in the synthesis process can unpredictably affect the structure of a biological product; (2) variations in the structure of a biological product can unpredictably affect the physiological effects of the product, including immunogenicity; and (3) analytical techniques are inadequate to characterize the structure of a biological product. I am more optimistic than Price and Rai that researchers will soon overcome all three challenges. Where private-sector funding may fall short, grant-funded research has already led to tremendous advances in biologics development technology. Rather than requiring more specific disclosure of synthesis processes, as Price and Rai recommend, FDA could and should require more specific disclosure of structure, harmonizing biologics regulation with small molecule regulation. FDA should also incentivize development of industrial scale cell-free protein synthesis processes.

IP and the Right to Repair

I ran across an interesting article last week that I thought I would share. It's called Intellectual Property Law and the Right to Repair, by Leah Chan Grinvald (Suffolk Law) and Ofer Tur-Sinai (Ono Academic College). A draft is on SSRN and the abstract is here:

In recent years, there has been a growing push in different U.S. states towards legislation that would provide consumers with a “right to repair” their products. Currently 18 states have pending legislation that would require product manufacturers to make available replacement parts and repair manuals. This grassroots movement has been triggered by a combination of related factors. One such factor is the ubiquity of microchips and software in an increasing number of consumer products, from smartphones to cars, which makes the repair of such products more complicated and dependent upon the availability of information supplied by the manufacturers. Another factor is the unscrupulous practices of large, multinational corporations designed to force consumers to repair their products only through their own offered services, and ultimately, to manipulate consumers into buying newer products instead of repairing them. These factors have rallied repair shops, e-recyclers, and other do-it-yourselfers to push forward, demanding a right to repair.

Unfortunately, though, this legislation has stalled in many of the states. Manufacturers have been lobbying the legislatures to stop the enactment of the right to repair laws based on different concerns, including how these laws may impinge on their intellectual property rights. Indeed, a right to repair may not be easily reconcilable with the United States’ far-reaching intellectual property rights regime. For example, requiring manufacturers to release repair manuals could implicate a whole host of intellectual property laws, including trade secret. Similarly, employing measures undercutting a manufacturer's control of the market for replacement parts might conflict with patent exclusivity. Nonetheless, this Article’s thesis holds that intellectual property laws should not be used to inhibit the right to repair from being fully implemented.

In support of this claim, this Article develops a theoretical framework that enables justifying the right to repair in a manner that is consistent with intellectual property protection. In short, the analysis demonstrates that a right to repair can be justified by the very same rationales that have been used traditionally to justify intellectual property rights. Based on this theoretical foundation, this Article then explores, for the first time, the various intellectual property rules and doctrines that may be implicated in the context of the current repair movement. As part of this overview, this Article identifies those areas where intellectual property rights could prevent repair laws from being fully realized, even if some of the states pass the legislation, and recommends certain reforms that are necessary to accommodate the need for a right to repair and enable it to take hold.

I thought this was an interesting and provocative paper, even if I am skeptical of the central thesis. I should note that the first half of the paper or so makes the normative case, and the authors do a good job of laying out the case.

Many of the topics are those you see in the news, like how laws that forbid breaking DRM stop others from repairing their stuff (which now all has a computer) or how patent law can make it difficult to make patented repair parts.

The treatment of trade secrets, in particular, was a useful addition to the literature. As I wrote on the economics of trade secret many years ago, my view is that trade secrecy doesn't serve as an independent driver of innovation because people will keep their information secret anyway. Thus, any innovation effects are secondary, in the sense that savings made from not having to protect secrets so carefully can be channeled to R&D. But there was always a big caveat: this assumes that firms can "keep their information secret anyway," and that there's no forced disclosure rule.

So, when this article's hypothesized right to repair extended to disclosure of manuals, schematics, and other information necessary to repair, it caught my eye. On the one hand, as someone who has been frustrated by lack of manuals and reverse engineered repair of certain things, I love it. On the other hand, I wonder how requiring disclosure of such information would change the incentive to dynamics. With respect to schematics, companies would probably continue to create them, but perhaps they might make a second, less detailed schematic. Or, maybe nothing would happen because that information is required anyway. But with respect to manuals, I wonder whether companies would lose the incentive to keep detailed records of customer service incidents if they could not profit from it. Keeping such records is costly, and if repairs are charged to customers, it might be better to reinvent the wheel every time than to pay to maintain an information system that others will use. I doubt it, though, as there is still value in having others repair your goods, and if people can repair their own, then the market becomes even more competitive.

While the paper discusses the effect on the incentive to innovate with respect to other forms of IP, it does not do so for trade secrets.

With respect to other IP, the paper seems to take two primary positions on the effect of immunizing IP infringement for repair. The first is that the right to repair can also promote the progress, and thus it should be considered as part of the entire system. While I agree with the premise from a utilitarian point of view, I was not terribly convinced that the right to repair would somehow create incentives for more development that would outweigh initial design IP rights. It might, of course, but there's not a lot of nuanced argument (or evidence) in either direction.

The second position is that loosening IP rights will not weaken "core" incentives to develop the product in the first place, because manufacturers will still want to make the best/most innovative products possible. I think this argument is incomplete in two ways. Primarily, it assumes that manufacturers are monolithic. But the reality is that multiple companies design parts, and their incentive to do so (and frankly their ability to stay in business) may well depend on the ability to protect designs/copyright/etc. At the very least, it will affect pricing. For example, if a company charged for manuals, it may be because it had to pay a third party for each copy distributed. Knowing that such fees are not going to be paid, the original manual author will charge more up front, increasing the price of the product (indeed, the paper seems to assume very little effect on original prices to make up for lost repair revenue). Secondarily, downstream repairs may drive innovation in component parts. For example, how repairs are done might cause manufacturers to not improve parts for easy repair. The paper doesn't seem to grapple with this nuance.

This was an interesting paper, and worth a read. It's a long article - the authors worked hard to cover a large number of bases, and it certainly made me think harder about the right to repair.

#IPSC18 Preview: Design, Trade Secrets, and Right of Publicity

To get ready for IP scholar speed dating at Berkeley next week, I've previewed the panels focused on patents and innovation, copyright, and trademarks. Today: design, right of publicity, and trade secrets (including some notes on other panels where you can also find papers on these topics).

Contigiani, Barankay & Hsu on the Innovation Costs of Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine

For those looking on more trade secret empirics after Michael's post on Tuesday: Researchers at the Wharton School—Andrea Contigiani, Iwan Barankay, and David Hsu—have an interesting empirical study of the inevitable disclosure doctrine in trade secret law: Trade Secrets and Innovation: Evidence from the 'Inevitable Disclosure' Doctrine. This controversial doctrine allows employers to prevent former employees from taking a new job that will "inevitably" require them to use trade secrets. The doctrine has been rejected in California and many other states, and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 allows states to make this public policy choice. This new paper from Contigiani et al. provides some support for the California approach. Here is the abstract:

Does heightened employer-friendly trade secrecy protection help or hinder innovation? By examining U.S. state-level legal adoption of a doctrine allowing employers to curtail inventor mobility if the employee would "inevitably disclose" trade secrets, we investigate the impact of a shifting trade secrecy regime on individual-level patenting outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences design taking unaffected U.S. inventors as the comparison group, we find strengthening employer-friendly trade secrecy adversely affects innovation. We then investigate why. We do not find empirical support for diminished idea recombination from suppressed inventor mobility as the operative mechanism. While shifting intellectual property protection away from patenting into trade secrecy appears to be at work, our results are consistent with reduced individual-level incentives to signaling quality to the external labor market.

By "innovation" they mean citation-weighted patent counts, and this paper should be read with all of the usual caution and caveats for causal empirical studies. But I haven't seen a paper that has attempted this particular empirical approach before, so I thought it was interesting and worth a read by trade secrets scholars.

Data on the first year of the Defend Trade Secrets Act

In preparing for the Evil Twin Debate on the DTSA, David Levine (Elon) and Chris Seaman (Washington & Lee) were kind enough to share a draft of their empirical study of cases arising under the first year of the Defend Trade Secrets Act. Now that the article is forthcoming in Wake Forest Law Review and on SSRN, it only makes sense to share their latest draft. Here is the abstract:

This article represents the first comprehensive empirical study of the Defend Trade Secrets Act (“DTSA”), the law enacted by Congress in 2016 that created a federal civil cause of action for trade secret misappropriation. The DTSA represents the most significant expansion of federal involvement in intellectual property law in at least 30 years. In this study, we examine publicly-available docket information and pleadings to assess how private litigants have been utilizing the DTSA. Based upon an original dataset of nearly 500 newly-filed DTSA cases in federal court, we analyze whether the law is beginning to meet its sponsors’ stated goals of creating more robust and efficient litigation vehicles for trade secret misappropriation victims, thereby helping protect valuable American intellectual property assets.

We find that, similar to state trade secrets law, the paradigm misappropriation scenario under the DTSA involves a former employee who absconds with alleged trade secrets to a competitor. Other results, however, raise questions about the new law’s ability to effectively address modern cyberespionage threats, particularly from foreign actors, as well as the purpose (or lack thereof) of trade secret law more broadly. We conclude by discussing our data’s implications for trade secret law and litigation, as well as commenting on the DTSA’s potential impact on the broader issues of cybersecurity and information flow within our innovation ecosystem.

I found this to be an interesting, thorough, and insightful article. I think that the takeaways from the data will differ based on one's views of the DTSA. I suspect my view of the data is different from the view that Levine & Seaman have. Regardless, having the data to work with is immensely useful.

That said, there's still work to be done. The next step for anyone studying this area will be the next layer - looking at the most difficult concerns. For example, one of the most concerning aspect were  seizures; it would be helpful to know a) how often they are sought, b) how often they are granted, and c) what the circumstances were that led to granting. This article gives a good template for how to proceed with followup projects, and I am hopeful that Levine & Seaman keep it going!

A New Trade Secrets Survey of In-House Counsel

It feels like all trade secrets all the time these days, but the hits keep coming. I've got some patent scholarship queued up, but this new survey caught my eye. David Almeling and Darin Snyder have provided some quality empirical analysis of trade secret cases in the past. Their two articles (written with others) cover both state and federal courts, and provided solid empirical support for the proposition that most trade secret cases involve ex-employees rather than strangers.

They have now extended this work with a new study (co-authored with Carolyn Appel) that surveys in-house counsel about trade secret usage.  The study is here, though it is behind the Law360 paywall, which is unfortunate. It is available on Lexis, I believe, or through a free preview.

The authors surveyed 81 in-house counsel from a variety of industries; however, they acknowledge that their sample is self-selected, which means that those who care most about trade secrets may have answered. They did overyield (another 27 people were not such in-house counsel), which lends some support for the idea that answers were not simply driven by those who cared the most. On the other hand, most respondents worked for large, multi-state companies, which makes one wonder why more in-house counsel for smaller companies did not participate and whether their answers would be any different.

In my prior post on the DTSA and in the Evil Twin debate, I ask why there is a sudden push for the DTSA. This survey gives us some answers about the political economy - 75% of respondents said that trade secrets had grown more at risk in the last ten years, and 50% said they were at much more risk. This fear may or may not be well grounded, but if this is the perception, it will certainly drive policy. Relatedly, respondents reported that patent law changes were not driving use of trade secrets -- only 30% reported using trade secrets instead of patenting. Most, I suspect, want more of both.

A whopping 70% reported that their company had been a victim of trade secret misappropriation. Of those, employees or ex-employees were the perceived culprits 90% of the time, confirming (again) that most misappropriation is not stranger misappropriation.

The most surprising finding of the survey, in my view, was a question about whether the DTSA should preempt the UTSA. Non-preemption allows both to stand, which can not only create conflict, but also allows plaintiffs to choose the most favorable law. In my discussions with people after the debate, some thought non-preemption was the part of the DTSA that most showed a desire to expand trade secret's reach.

So, the surprising result was a nearly even three-way split between supporting preemption, opposing preemption, and not caring one way or the other. While academics seem to think that lack of preemption is a big deal, this self-selected group of in-house counsel seem to not care one way or the other. This finding could actually drive policy choices in the future.

I'll conclude with that brief recap - while the article is short, there is more to see, about the types of secrets, the role in innovation, and the cost of misappropriation. I will end on this note, however: the costs borne by most companies from misappropriation were investigation and litigation. This is to be expected, as everyone investigates and litigation costs are high. But the other costs of misappropriation were spread out among price erosion, loss of sales, increased costs of protection (my own personal theory), and even none. I think this shows two things. First, when messaging in this area is not consistent, it may be that companies are perceiving the problem in their own ways. Second, it may be that enforcement efforts wind up dwarfing the actual harm of misappropriation in some cases.

Is the Defending Trade Secret Act Defensible? The Movie

As noted a couple weeks ago, Orly Lobel (San Diego) and I debated the DTSA at the AALS Conference. As promised, I'm posting video of that conference here.

Rebecca Wexler on IP in the Criminal Justice System

The protection of criminal justice technologies with trade secrets is a hot topic. Last Term, the Supreme Court called for the views of the solicitor general in Loomis v. Wisconsin on whether using proprietary software for sentencing is a due process violation, though they ultimately denied the cert petition. Last month, I described Natalie Ram's forthcoming article, which focuses on the innovation angle: Ram argues that trade secrecy protection is not necessary for efficient levels of innovation for these kinds of technologies. I just enjoyed another terrific article in this space by Yale Information Society Project Fellow Rebecca Wexler: Life, Liberty, and Trade Secrets: Intellectual Property in the Criminal Justice System, forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review.

Wexler describes the growing privatization of the criminal justice system, particularly through black-box algorithms. She explains that the importance of trade secrecy in this area is likely to grow: data-driven systems for forensics or risk assessment are more difficult to protect with patents post-Alice, whereas trends like the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 seem to have strengthened the value of trade secrets. Wexler agrees that the innovation policy rationale for secrecy of criminal justice technologies is unconvincing and that this secrecy may raise due process concerns, but the focus of her article is on the problems with this trend as a matter of the law of evidence. She argues that the trade secrets privilege that two-thirds of states have codified in their evidence rules should not exist in criminal proceedings—rather, as for other sensitive information like medical records, courts should simply use protective orders to limit the distribution of trade secrets beyond the needs of the proceeding.

Since I am not an evidence law expert, I will not discuss these aspects of Wexler's argument in detail; in short, she explains that the trade secrets privilege is harmful and unnecessary in criminal cases, and that it does not serve the purpose of evidentiary privilege law. From an IP perspective, she also argues that none of the theoretical justifications for trade secrecy law support the privilege. She suggests that the privilege is most analogous to the controversial "inevitable disclosure" doctrine, under which some states will enjoin conduct based on a speculative concern rather than any direct evidence of threatened misappropriation. But even here, the trade secrets privilege doctrine overprotects because it is upheld without any reference to the circumstances of a particular case. Wexler also notes that "claims that secrecy will incentivize innovation are tenuous at best when the privilege shields information from criminal defendants who are unlikely to be business competitors." And despite the status quo of robust protection, a 2009 National Academy of Sciences report notes the "dearth of peer-reviewed, published studies establishing the scientific bases and validity of many forensic methods"; as Wexler explains, greater transparency is likely to improve rather than worsen this problem.

I think there is plenty in Wexler's article to interest scholars of IP, criminal procedure, evidence, and more. But more importantly, I hope it is read by judges in criminal cases who are faced with assertions of trade secrets privilege. And judges will have opportunities since the issue is percolating through the courts in other cases, such as California v. Johnson; see the defense attorney's brief (which cites Wexler's article), as well as amicus briefs from the ACLU, EFF, Legal Aid, and Innocence Project. It seems like it is time for the uncritical acceptance of the privilege to end, and for judges and practitioners to grapple with the concerns Wexler raises.

Natalie Ram: Innovating Criminal Justice

Natalie Ram (Baltimore Law) applies the tools of innovation policy to the problem of criminal justice technology in her latest article, Innovating Criminal Justice (forthcoming in the Northwestern University Law Review), which is worth a read by innovation and criminal law scholars alike. Her dive into privately developed criminal justice technologies—"[f]rom secret stingray devices that can pinpoint a suspect’s location to source code secrecy surrounding alcohol breath test machines, advanced forensic DNA analysis tools, and recidivism risk statistic software"—provides both a useful reminder that optimal innovation policy is context specific and a worrying depiction of the problems that over-reliance on trade secrecy has wrought in this field.

She recounts how trade secrecy law has often been used to shield criminal justice technologies from outside scrutiny. For example, criminal defense lawyers have been unable to examine the source code for TrueAllele, a private software program for analyzing difficult DNA mixtures. Similarly, the manufacturer of Intoxilyzer, a breath test, has fought efforts for disclosure of its source code. But access to the algorithms and other technical details used for generating incriminating evidence is important for identifying errors and weaknesses, increasing confidence in their reliability (and in the criminal justice system more broadly), and promoting follow-on innovations. Ram also argues that in some cases, secrecy may raise constitutional concerns under the Fourth Amendment, the Due Process Clause, or the Confrontation Clause.

Drawing on the full innovation policy toolbox, Ram argues that contrary to the claims of developers of these technologies, trade secret protection is not essential for the production of useful innovation in this field: "The government has at its disposal a multitude of alternative policy mechanisms to spur innovation, none of which mandate secrecy and most of which will easily accommodate a robust disclosure requirement." Patent law, for example, has the advantage of increased disclosure compared with trade secrecy. Although some of the key technologies Ram discusses are algorithms that may not be patentable subject matter post-Alice, to the extent patent-like protection is desirable, regulatory exclusivities could be created for approved (and disclosed) technologies. R&D tax incentives for such technologies also could be conditioned on public disclosure.

But one of Ram's most interesting points is that the main advantage of patents and taxes over other innovation policy tools—eliciting information about the value of technologies based their market demand—is significantly weakened for most criminal justice technologies for which the government is the only significant purchaser. For example, there is little private demand for recidivism risk statistical packages. Thus, to the extent added incentives are needed, this may be a field in which the most effective tools are government-set innovation rewards—grants, other direct spending, and innovation inducement prizes—that are conditioned on public accessibility of the resulting algorithms and other technologies. In some cases, agencies looking for innovations may even be able to collaborate at no financial cost with academics such as law professors or other social scientists who are looking for opportunities to conduct rigorous field tests.

Criminal justice technologies are not the only field of innovation in which trade secrecy can pose significant social costs, though most prior discussions I have seen are focused on purely medical technologies. For instance, Nicholson Price and Arti Rai have argued that secrecy in biologic manufacturing is a major public policy problem, and a number of scholars (including Bob Cook-Deegan et al., Dan Burk, and Brenda Simon & Ted Sichelman) have discussed the problems with secrecy over clinical data such as genetic testing information. It may be worth thinking more broadly about the competing costs and benefits of trade secrecy and disclosure in certain areas—while keeping in mind that the inability to keep secrets does not mean the end of innovation in a given field.

IP and Climate Change

My colleague and friend Josh Sarnoff (DePaul) sent me a review copy of the book he edited: Intellectual Property and Climate Change, even though I told him I wouldn't have much time to look at it. Wouldn't you know, on a quick skim I found it pretty interesting, and thought I would talk about it a bit.

The book is part of the Elgar Research Handbook series. I wrote a chapter that I really like (who am I kidding, I just love that book chapter) in the Research Handbook on Trade Secret Law. But because it's in an expensive book, nobody seems to know about it (and my colleagues in trade secret law will attest that I remind them whenever I review one of their drafts that is remotely in the area of trade secrets and incentives).

So, I thought I would flag this book, so readers would know this is out there. IP will have a growing role in climate change, as this cool story from this week illustrates. The book is comprehensive - it has 26 chapters from a variety of different authors. Some of the topics:

• International law and TRIPS
• Enforcement
• Technology transfer
• Innovation funding and university research
• Antitrust, patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks
• Rights in climate data
• Privacy (this one surprised me)
• Standards
• Energy, transportation, food, natural resources

There is something for everyone in this book. Though it is focused on climate change, much of the discussion can be generalized to other emerging areas of law. In that sense, it does present a little bit like the law of the horse, but given that this is a research handbook, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.

A Comprehensive Study of Trade Secret Damages

Elizabeth Rowe (Florida) has shared a draft of "Unpacking Trade Secret Damages" on SSRN. The paper is an ambitious one, examining all of the federal trade secret verdicts she could find (which she believes is a reasonably complete set based on her methods) that issued between 2000 and 2014. The abstract is:

This study is the first to conduct an in-depth empirical analysis of damages in trade secret cases in the U.S. From an original data set of cases in federal courts from 2000 to 2014, I assess the damages awarded on trade secret claims. In addition, a wide range of other variables are incorporated into the analysis, including those related to background court and jurisdiction information, the kinds of trade secrets at issue, background details about the parties, the related causes of action included with claims of trade secret misappropriation, and details about the damages awarded.

Analysis of this data and the relationship between and among the variables yields insightful observations and answers fundamental questions about the patterns and the nature of damages in trade secret misappropriation cases. For instance, I find average trade secret damage awards comparable to those in patent cases and much larger than trademark cases, very positive overall outcomes for plaintiffs, and higher damages on business information than other types of trade secrets. The results make significant contributions in providing deeper context and understanding for trade secret litigation and IP litigation generally, especially now that we enter a new era of trade secret litigation in federal courts under the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016.

I think this study has a lot to offer. Although it doesn't include state court cases, it provides a detailed look at trade secret cases in the first part of this century. Of course, the verdicts, which were about 6% of all trade secret cases filed, are subject to the same selection effects as any other verdict analysis - there is a whole array of cases (more than 2000 of them in the federal system alone) that never made it this far, and we don't know what the tried cases tells us about the shorter-lived cases.

The study offers a lot of details: amounts of awards, states with the highest awards, states with the most litigation, judge v. jury, attorneys' fees, punitive damages, the effect of NDAs on damages, etc. It goes a step further and offers information about the types of information at issue, and even the types of information that garner different sizes of awards. It's really useful information, and I recommend this study to anyone interested in the state of trade secret litigation today.

There are, however, a couple ways I think the information could have been presented differently. First, the study has some percentile information which was great, but most of it focuses on averages. This is a concern because the data is highly skewed; one nearly billion dollar verdict drives much of the relevant totals. Thus, it is difficult to get a real sense for how the verdicts look and there is no standard deviation reported.

Of course, the median award according to the paper is zero, so reporting medians is a problem. I particularly liked the percentile table and discussion, and I wonder whether a 25/50/75 presentation would work. Speaking of zero dollar awards, though, I thought the paper could be improved by clarifying what is calculated in the average. Is it the average of all verdicts? All verdicts where the plaintiff wins? All non-zero verdicts? Related to this, I thought that clearly disaggregating defendant verdicts would be helpful. The paper reports how many plaintiffs won, but this is not reflected in either the median or average award data (that I can tell - only total cases are reported). At one point the paper discusses the average verdict for defendants (more than $800,000) which is confusing since defendants shouldn't win any damages. Are these part of the averages? Are they calculated as a negative value? If these are fee awards, they should be reported separately, I would think.

Though I would like more data resolution, I should note that this really is just a presentation issue. The hard part is done, and the data is clearly available to slice and dice in a variety of ways, and I look forward to further reporting of it.

[with Colleen Chien] Recap of the Berkley Software IP Symposium

Slides and papers from the 20th Annual Berkeley Center for Law and Technology/Berkeley Technology Law Journal Symposium - focused on IP and software are now posted. Colleen Chien and I thought we would discuss a few highlights (with some commentary sprinkled in):

David Hayes' opening keynote on the history of software and IP was terrific. The general tenor was that copyright rose and fell with a lot of uncertainty in between. Just was copyright fell, patent rose, and is now falling, with a lot of uncertainty in between. And trade secret law has remained generally steady throughout. David has long been the Chair of the Intellectual Property Group of Fenwick and West, former home to USPTO Director Michelle Lee, as well as IP professors Brenda Simon, Steve Yelderman, and Colleen Chien and is one of the wisest and most experienced IP counselors in the valley. (Relatedly, Michael Risch's former firm was founded by former Fenwick & West lawyers.)

Peter Menell's masterful presentation on copyright and software spanned decades and ended with a Star Wars message, "May the Fair Use Be With You."

Randall Picker took a different view of copyright and software, focusing instead on whether reuse was simply an add-on/clone or a new platform/core product. Thus, he thought Sega v. Accolade came out wrong because allowing fair use for an unlicensed game undermined the discount pricing for game consoles, but thought Whelan v. Jaslow (a case nearly everyone hates) came out properly because the infringing software was a me-too clone. Borland, on the other hand, created a whole new spreadsheet program to create competition. In related work, Risch published "How can Whelan v. Jaslow and Lotus v. Borland Both be Right?" some 15 years ago.

Felix Wu presented an interesting talk about how the copyright "abstraction-filtration-comparison" test might be used to determine the meaning of "means plus function" claims in patent law.

MIT's Randall Davis's "technical talk" explained how software is made and how abstractions are the essence of software. It's turtles all the way down: one level that seems concrete is merely an abstraction when viewed from the level below. The challenge, it seems, is that calling anything abstract can have wide meaning.

Rob Merges further discussed how we might define abstract. His suggestion was to look at abstract as the opposite of concrete and definite. Thus, patents would need to be far more detailed than many that are being rejected now, but such a standard might be more clear to apply.

Arti Rai discussed a similar solution, noting that lower levels of abstraction were more likely to be affirmed. Furthermore, solutions to computer specific problems seem to hold a key. Rai and Merges should be posting papers on these topics soon.

Kevin Collins presented a draft paper on Williamson v. Citrix Online. He posited that Williamson would present difficult challenges for courts trying to determine structure - including structure that's supposedly present in the claim. He presented some ideas about how to think about solutions to the problem.

Similarly, Lee Van Pelt showed some difficulties with Williamson (including Williamson itself) in practice.

Michael Risch's talk and paper leaves off where Hayes ended, with the fall of patents. It explores whether or not, in the wake of the trouble software patents are in, developers might turn to trade secret to protect visible features, and what the implications might be. It turns out that less than a week after the conference, a software company won a $940m jury verdict on exactly this theory.

Colleen Chien's talk explored, if software is eating the world (H/T MarcAndreesen), how much IP and its default allotments matter, in a world where contract is king, and monopolies are coming from data, network effects, scale (a la Thiel) and, possibly, winner take all dynamics, as discussed on Mike Masnick’s recent podcast rather than patents and copyrights. It presents early results and an early draft paper from an analysis of ~2000 technology agreements and some 30k sales involving software, finding evidence of both technology and liability transfers.

Aaron Perzanowski's presentation and forthcoming book with Jason Schultz suggests that perhaps the IoT should be known as IoThings-We-Don't-Own.

Relatedly, John Duffy addressed the first sale doctrine and presented his recent paper with Richard Hynes that shows how commercial law ties to and explains how exhaustion should work. This is relevant to the Federal Circuit's recent decision in the Lexmark case on international exhaustion.

Second day lunchtime keynote, William Raduchel, talked about the importance of culture to innovation and IP. As Mark Zuckerberg mentioned on an investor call, Facebook develops openly (some of it's IT infrastructure and non-core innovation, at least) because that's what it's developers demand and need to get the job done. He also discussed how "deep learning" may change how we consider IP, because computers will now be writing the code that produces creative and inventive output.

The empirical panel provided a helpful overview of recent studies. Pam Samuelson’s talk highlighted changes in the software industry, particularly with the growth of software as a service (SaAS), the cloud, the app market, the IoT, and embedded software as well as the software IP protection landscape since the Berkeley Patent Survey was carried out in 2007. Samuelson also discussed how recent invalidations of algorithms and data structure patents will affect copyright. If those features are too abstract for patenting, then we should consider whether they are too abstract for copyright protection, even if they might be expressed in multiple ways. (NB: A return to the old Baker v. Selden conundrum: bookkeeping systems are the province of patents, not copyrights. But can you patent a bookkeeping system? Maybe a long time ago, but surely not today).

John Allison gave an overview of what we know (empirically) about software patents. And the chief IP officers panel was a highlight, as each person had a different perspective on the system based on its own position - though they did agree on a few basics, such as the need for some way to appropriate investments and the preference for clear lines.

There is much more at the link to the symposium, including slides, drafts, and past (but relevant) papers. It's well worth a look! TAP is also running a seven-part series on the conference, starting with this overview of David Hayes' talk.

Do Non-Compete Agreements Really Impede Innovation?

I spent my entire practice career in California, representing clients who were, by and large, free to move from company to company due California's ban on covenants not to compete. At the time, the question of inevitable disclosure was unsettled in California; the law allowed for injunctions to stop "threatened" misappropriation, but the question was whether merely being in the same business is a sufficient threat. Most people though no, and the courts eventually went there.

But employees were not always free to do as they wished. I represented many employees against their awful former employers who (wrongfully) claimed that the employee had exited with trade secrets. And I represented many companies against their awful former employees who (wrongfully) claimed they had exited cleanly without trade secrets. For this reason, I've always bristled at the notion that California is a place where everyone happily moves from company to company and nobody cares or legitimately worries about trade secrets because it's all good.

But through this all, I always thought employee mobility was a good thing. I still do. And so do a lot of other people. Indeed, a sort of orthodoxy has arisen where you simply can't be honest, pro-innovation, and pro-noncompete all at the same time. It's as if an entire strand of the literature on how non-competes can improve investments in human capital training got lost in the mix, replaced by theory that says the contrary. This theory is supported by evidence from empirical studies on the matter. It seems crystal clear.

Not so, according to Jonathan Barnett (USC) and Ted Sichelman (San Diego). A draft of their paper, Revisiting Labor Mobility in Innovation is now up on SSRN. In it, they take on the orthodoxy:

It is now widely asserted that legal regimes that enforce contractual and other limitations on labor mobility deter technological innovation. First, recent empirical studies purport to show relationships between bans on enforcing noncompete agreements, increased employee movement, and increased innovation. We find that these studies misconstrue legal differences across states and otherwise are flawed, incomplete, or limited in applicability. Second, scholars have largely adopted the view that California’s policy against noncompetes promoted Silicon Valley as the world’s leading technology center. By contrast, Massachusetts’ enforcement of noncompetes purportedly stunted innovation in the Route 128 region near Boston. We show that this account is incomplete. During the rise of Silicon Valley, California noncompete law did not as vigorously preclude noncompetes as today and firms could substantially mimic noncompetes through contractual and other instruments. Rather, fundamental technological and economic factors more persuasively account for the rise of Silicon Valley and the Boston area has remained a significant innovation center. There is little compelling ground for the view that barring noncompetes and other limitations on employee mobility promotes innovation.

I believe this is an important paper, even if you are not inclined to agree with its conclusions. I'll discuss more after the jump.