How Information Shapes Intellectual Property and its Legal Protection

Secrecy is a commonly used tool in firms’ intellectual property (IP) protection toolkits. It is, however, by nature not an easy subject for research. (Trade) secrets are by definition secret, and data are difficult to come by. In the words of Dr. Nicola Searle, senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, trade secrets are the Schrödinger’s cat of IP – they both do and do not exist until they surface in the wake of a legal dispute. She presented a systematic study of such court cases to shed new light on firms’ joint use of secrecy and patents in IP management. In further presentations, the authors focused on the usage of secrecy in environments characterised by different levels of misappropriation as well as on the effects of the strength of legal protection of trade secrets. The presented work highlighted some unresolved and open questions that future work will need to address.

Scientific publications are an important source of information, and firms not only disclose their research results in patents, but also publish them in scientific journals. Associate Professor Markus Simeth from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, presented new results that shed light on firms’ incentives to choose scientific publications as a vehicle for disclosure. He and his co-authors find that disclosure through scientific publications can mitigate problems of asymmetric information in financial markets and improve firms’ access to capital. Their findings have important implications for the welfare effects of transparency initiatives in financial markets – namely, when the impact of such initiatives spills over into technology markets.