Claiming a trade secret in your product’s design? [Wang v. Golf Tailor]

We’ve said it before: the one thing fatal to protecting your trade secrets is talking about them.

Now another court’s said it too. “Public discusure, that is the absence of secrecy, is fatal to the existence of a trade secret,” says the court in Wang v. Golf Tailor.

But public disclosure comes in forms other than loose lips. It can come from the claimed trade secret itself. If you sell a product to the public and the “so-called trade secret is fully disclosed by the product,” then it’s not actually a trade secret.

Consider: trade secrets in a product’s design. You’ve maybe got a trade secret before you take the product to market. But not after. As Wang recognizes, design features are “obviously” revealed by the product’s sale. So there’s no design trade secrets after the products are sold to the public.