Secrecy is dead - Long live trade secrets

The future of intellectual property is in trade secrets. Changes to patent law make obtaining a patent more costly in some cases and impossible in others. The relentless spread of networked computing, with its inevitable vulnerabilities, and digital data make non-legal means of maintaining secrecy increasingly unreliable. Innovators will be forced to turn to trade secrets. This newfound prominence for trade secrecy will generate tensions with freedom of speech protections, federalism, and the balance between civil and criminal enforcement. The Article, part of a symposium on the Future World IP by the Denver Law Review, closes with a set of testable empirical predictions to evaluate its claims.