Keeping Your Idea Confidential
As long as your idea is not disclosed to others or is disclosed to others only in confidence, you have
some limited protection over your idea. This is true at least as long as no one else comes up with a similar
idea and as long as no one to whom you have disclosed your invention breaches your confidence by
telling it to others. In this respect, if you do disclose the invention to someone in confidence and that
person then discloses it to others who use the invention, you can sue the person to whom the confidential
disclosure was made for breach of the confidential relationship. Sometimes, these suits are hard to win.
Thus, if you are trying to keep your idea confidential, you should always obtain a confidential disclosure
agreement in writing from the person to whom you are going to disclose your idea
4.02 Keeping Your Idea Confidential
before you disclose it
to him. That agreement should say that that person agrees to keep the idea confidential and not to make
any use of the idea absent a further written agreement with you.
Unless you have a special relationship with a manufacturer, it is very unlikely that the company will
agree to evaluate your idea in confidence. Thus, if you decide to submit your idea to a manufacturer
before a property interest such as a patent right is established there is risk involved. In this respect, it is a
common practice for a corporation to advise an individual who submits an idea to it that the individual
must sign a waiver of confidentiality agreement before the corporation will look at the inventor’s idea.
Such agreements generally state that there is no confidential relationship established between the
individual and the corporation, that the corporation is agreeing to look at the idea solely to see if it is
interested in licensing or purchasing rights to the idea, and that the individual relies for compensation
solely on any rights he may have or later obtain under the patent, trademark, and copyright laws of the
United States. If you sign such an agreement, you must realize that it means exactly what it says, and that
unless you then have or are later able to obtain patent, trademark or copyright protection for your idea,
you are very unlikely ever to receive any compensation from the corporation even if it does use your idea.
Moreover, you should weigh the fact that a non-confidential submission of an invention to a manufacturer
before you have filed a patent application may preclude you from ever obtaining valid patent protection in
many foreign countries, and may start a one-year time period running after which you will not be able to
file an application for a patent on the invention even in the United States.
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