(A Six Minute Read)


In case you are not aware of this recently filed, popular American case, lets bring you up to date:

Anthony Levandowski, was a former manager at Waymo’s self-driving car project, he left the company in January 2016, after which he formed a new company in February 2016 that called Otto, and he sold Otto to Uber in August 2016 for $680 million. Uber's top major purpose of acquiring Otto was specifically for its use of laser sensors to guide self-driving cars (“LiDAR” technology). Waymo, too, uses a proprietary LiDAR system in its self-driving cars and contends that its trade secrets were obtained by Otto and Uber.

Waymo's Side of the Story

Waymo alleges that Levandowski copied approximately 14,000 files from Waymo months before leaving the company, wiped and reformatted his company-issued hard-drive to avoid detection, and met with Uber representatives while still in the employment of Waymo.
Uber by purchasing Otto, acquired the stolen information. Waymo only knew about the alleged theft when a mutual supplier copied Waymo on an email containing machine drawings for components of Otto’s LiDAR system – which were remarkably similar to Waymo’s.  
Hence, the suit. Waymo claims for temporary and permanent injunctive relief as well as monetary damages.

Uber's version:

Uber denies this allegation, it also states that the lawsuit filed by Waymo is a premeditated attempt to curtail competition, which Uber poses to Waymo.

What is trade secret
A trade secret is any information that derives economic value from being unknown by others who could gain value from its use or disclosure and is also protected from public knowledge, use, or disclosure by reasonable measures.
Examples of trade secrets include customer lists, trade mixture or combinations and machine or Technology blueprints, Mechanical formulas, computer softwares, or data.
The major difference between Trade secrets and other forms of intellectual property, is public knowledge. Trade secrets must be kept from the public at all times. Most importantly, unlike the other forms of intellectual property , trade secrets law does not grant a set of exclusive control/use rights; instead, it merely protects the information from wrongful access.

Although not all start-ups or business in Nigeria can be said to have trade secrets to protect. Most business and startups that have trade secrets, the run the risk of misappropriating it in the start-up phase, such as sourcing for investors or seed funding stages.

Possible Prevention Techniques

1). Contractual Agreements
As a business or startup, you cannot, with 100 percent assurance, control your trade secret in a water tight manner. Some persons, workers, in the company will know about it. One of the means of preventing disclosure is though various contractual agreements such as non disclosure agreements and non compete agreements.
If your business has trade secrets, you should be taking reasonable steps to protect the secrecy of the information, beginning with non disclosure agreements and, where applicable, non compete agreements.
We will analyse NDAs and non compete agreements in future posts.

2). High Technology Security.
In pursing a claim in court, the court would likely look into the measures and securities your have put in place to prevent such trade secret misappropriation. Apart from the court perspective, a business will save it self a lot of headaches if it puts in place reasonable security measures to guide against such incidence.
To do this, this, may establish a secured process of monitoring access to secured or encrypted information, which alerts you immediately certain high valued trade secret are accessed by unauthorized persons or authorized persons through authorized or unauthorized means, either to download, upload t or transfer the files.

3). Employee Awareness
Let employees know what trade secrets are, why they should not access it, how they should access it, who to access it, and the implication of unauthorized access and misappropriation os such secret.








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This is interesting and as you said, trade secret is not common in Nigeria, probably because most of the products and services produced here does not have high intellectual property qualities. Though, with the recent advent of technology startups in the country, it's pertinent that tech startup should have this in place.