The skills and innovations of indigenous and local communities - their so-called “traditional knowledge” - go largely unrecognized by intellectual property law. Meanwhile, patent and copyright laws reward the innovative and creative contributions of individuals and firms that freely use...

This note seeks to understand the tension between trade secrecy law and patent law pointed out by Judge Hand. Further, this Note argues that the recently enacted America Invents Act (“AIA”) overrules the holding from Metallizing Engineering that secret prior commercial use by an inventor...

To date, more and more decisions are supported or even directly assumed by algorithms. As a result, we need to understand how to prevent and govern those algorithmic choices that may prove to be wrong, unfair, or discriminatory. Algorithmic transparency, that is, the possibility to investigate...

The paper investigates the optimal scope of trade secrets law. In the model, one innovative firm invests resources first to produce knowledge, and then to protect it from unwanted disclosure. A rival firm invests to ferret out this knowledge. Trade secrets law affects this "secrecy contest" by...

The standardisation of trade secret protection was one of the goals of the TRIPs Agreement of 1998. Nevertheless, substantial differences in this protection remain across jurisdictions. When defining the optimal scope of trade secrets law, lawmakers should be aware that strong trade secret...

We use exogenous variation in the strength of trade secrets protection to show that a relative weakening of patents (compared to trade secrets) has a disproportionately negative effect on the disclosure of processes - inventions that are not otherwise visible to society. We develop a structural...