It's a truism to say that a secret is no longer a secret once it's been shared.
There are ways in which the law can offer some protection here against abuse of secrets, provided you know those ways!
The starting point is that the legal protection for *ideas* is limited to that provided by the law of confidentiality and secrets - ideas are not capable of being protected by copyright.
The law of confidentiality and secrets will protect secrets from being abused where information
This protection is independent of any contract.
In practice however it is wise (and common practice) to what you need is to get the other party to sign an agreement acknowledging your rights of confidentiality, in order to avoid risks of misunderstanding. This document will generally define what they can and can't do with the information you disclose, and will provide a mechanism for dealing with the situation where they claim 'ah well as it happens, we knew that already and were already working on it'.
This type of agreement is fairly straightforward, and will typically be used in the pre-contract situation, where you need to disclose some secrets to another party before you can both decide whether you want to do business together. Or where they need to disclose secrets to you, for the same reason.
I can generally produce this as a 'recyclable', so that you have it available for use on future occasions as well.
If you'd like to explore this further, mail me for more details.
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This page was last updated on 25th September 2002.
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