Yearly Archives: 2019

What Copyright Might Teach Trade Secrecy

Feb 5, 2019 Pamela SamuelsonAdd a Comment

Joseph P. Fishman & Deepa Varadarajan, Similar Secrets, 167 U Penn. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at SSRN.

When an employee has had lawful access to her firm’s trade secrets and later uses them when working for a new employer or when starting her own firm, the former employer may well sue her for trade secret misappropriation. Disputes in such cases routinely focus on identifying the secrets at issue, examining the process by which the alleged misappropriation occurred, and assessing what advantages the employee may have gotten from use of those secrets.

Should courts also consider how much similarity exists between the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s products, processes, or services? And should courts also consider whether the defendant’s new firm and the old firm directly compete or operate in different and arguably unforeseen markets? Similar Secrets says the answer to both questions should be yes. Its thesis is that defendants should not be liable for misappropriation of lawfully acquired trade secrets unless later-developed products or methods incorporate material elements from those secrets and use those elements in the same market in which the plaintiff firm competes, or in an adjacent market into which it is reasonably foreseeable that the plaintiff firm might enter.¹

Two considerations seem to underlie the authors’ recommendations: The first is employee mobility. No one, the authors argue, should have to get a frontal lobotomy when they change jobs, especially in technical fields. Employees should be able to continue to use knowledge they acquired on the job when they move on. Secondly, society will benefit if experienced employees can build on the knowledge they acquired on their previous jobs by developing new products in different market sectors.

Trade secrecy law, Fishman and Varadarajan argue, currently gives rightsholders more control over adaptive uses of their intellectual property than either copyright or patent law would do. Courts in copyright cases, for example, take into account how much similarity exists between the plaintiff’s work and the alleged infringer’s work, how transformative the second use was, and whether the adaptation operates in the same or reasonably foreseeable markets. The less similar the two works, the more transformative, and the more unforeseen or remote the second comer’s market segment, the more likely the adaptive use will be found noninfringing.

Patent law also allows more adaptive uses of earlier innovations than trade secrecy law does. Infringement cannot be found, for instance, unless all elements of the patent claims “read onto” the alleged infringer’s product. Second comers are thus free to use some elements of the invention, though not all. Moreover, a second comer’s innovation that builds on a patented invention can itself be patented, and that later patent will prevent the owner of the underlying patent from exploiting the improvement without the later patentee’s permission. In addition, the reverse doctrine of equivalents means that a product that seemingly literally infringed a patent will be held nonnfringing if it operates on a sufficiently different principle.

Fishman and Varadarajan would have trade secret adjudicators learn several other lessons from copyright. They recommend that courts in trade secret cases use a copyright-like methodology for judging misappropriation: first, a factual inquiry into whether the defendant used the plaintiff’s secret (akin to the probative similarity step in copyright to decide whether the defendant copied something from the plaintiff’s work), and second, a normative inquiry about whether the taking was sufficiently substantial to justify liability.

The authors would also borrow from copyright law the concept of filtering out unprotectable elements, as the Second Circuit directed in Computer Associates Int’l, Inc. v. Altai. A creative combination of public domain elements may infringe a copyright or constitute a protectable trade secret, but the larger the quantum of unprotectable elements, the less likely a court should find misappropriation, the authors argue. It is useful to recognize that trade secrets, like copyrights, may sometimes provide “thick” protection (e.g., the recipe for Coca Cola) and sometimes “thin” protection (e.g., customer lists). A higher degree of similarity should be required if trade secrets, like some copyrights, are eligible for only “thin” protection.

Trade secrecy law might also usefully borrow from copyright the idea that a defendant’s intermediate uses of protected subject matters should be given little or no weight if the product the defendant ships is not substantially similar in its use of copyrights or trade secrets.

As for foreseeability, Fishman and Varadarajan argue that migrating a secret from the plaintiff’s market to unforeseen or unforeseeable markets cannot harm the trade secret claimant. A plaintiff’s decision to invest in developing particular secrets was presumably based on its plans to exploit the secrets in foreseen markets. Use of the secrets (again, only those that were lawfully acquired) in unforeseen or remote markets won’t undermine the initial developer’s incentives to invest. Moreover, second comers also need incentives to invest in developing products in different markets that draw upon the secret but use it in different ways. The analogy is to copyright’s breathing space for transformative uses that operate in unforeseen markets. Similar Secrets offers examples of secrets that were reused in unforeseen markets that the authors think should be free from trade secrecy liability.

Fishman and Varadarajan suggest that the best way to implement their recommended adaptations of trade secrecy law would be for courts to consider the similarity and foreseeability factors in deliberations about whether misappropriation had occurred. But similarity and unforeseeability could also be affirmative defenses or affect remedies that should be imposed in trade secret cases. Legislation would not be needed to effectuate these changes.

While I will not hold my breath waiting for any of these changes to be adopted by courts in trade secret cases, the analysis in Similar Secrets was surprisingly persuasive. At least as a thought experiment, its thesis that trade secrecy law should not be in a bell jar, but open to learning useful lessons from other forms of IP law, struck me as sound. The adaptations recommended may not impact trade secrecy law as much as some practitioners might fear, as a great deal of misappropriation arises from wrongful acquisition or disclosure of trade secrets or from former employees or licensees who wrongfully use the secrets in direct competition with the trade secret claimant. But for the cases in which the adaptations the authors recommend might apply, why not inject more innovation policy considerations in trade secrecy misappropriation cases?

Cite as: Pamela Samuelson, What Copyright Might Teach Trade Secrecy, JOTWELL (February 5, 2019) (reviewing Joseph P. Fishman & Deepa Varadarajan, Similar Secrets, 167 U Penn. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2019), available at SSRN), https://ip.jotwell.com/what-copyright-might-teach-trade-secrecy/.

Lunney’s Paradox: More Copyright May Lead to Less Creativity

Jan 18, 2019 Christopher J. SprigmanAdd a Comment

Glynn Lunney, Copyright's Excess: Money and Music in the US Recording Industry (2018).

The title of Glynn Lunney’s new book, Copyright’s Excess, presents a puzzle for those of us who have reflected on the nature and function of copyright law. Copyright is typically justified as a system of incentives. By giving authors (and by contract, publishers) exclusive control over commercially significant reproductions and distributions of their artistic and literary works, copyright helps to ensure that the copyright owner, and not copyists, will capture any profits made from exploiting the work. Copyright, in short, is supposed to help authors make more money. And in a world that works as economists expect, more money for authors should lead to more creative output. The equation seems simple: more copyright = more art and culture. But is this true? Is it possible that copyright protections might backfire, and result in less creative output rather than more?

Lunney’s book offers considerable evidence that, at least in the music industry, it is at least an uncomfortably plausible possibility that more copyright has led to less creativity. Lunney, a lawyer-economist, takes a painstaking look at music sales data dating back to the early 1960s, including data tracking the rise of recording music revenues up to Napster’s debut in 1999, followed by their precipitous decline. The shock to music industry revenues caused by Napster (and what followed) provided the makings for a terrific natural experiment: did increased revenue from the early 1960s to 1999 lead to more new music? And did plummeting revenues after 1999 lead to a dearth of new music?

Assessing this natural experiment correctly presents Lunney with some serious complexities. One is that he must account for changes in the quality of recorded music produced over this long period, a task which requires an appraisal of how quality has varied over time. Lunney handles this task with some creative empirical and analytic strategies, the details of which I’ll omit here. Suffice to say that the quality adjustment methodology Lunney employs is, at least to my eye, the most contestable element of his project. But if the reader accepts what he’s done on that point, then his conclusions follow nicely, and they are beyond startling.

Despite a post-Napster decline in revenue approaching 80% (adjusted for inflation), the number of new albums released in the U.S. nearly doubled between 1999 (38,857) and 2012 (76,882). There is, moreover, no evidence of a decline in the quality of new music during that period. None of the various metrics Lunney uses for measuring quality show a positive correlation with revenue, and indeed for some of the measures, the correlation was statistically significant but negative – i.e., more money appears to have led to lower quality music.

What’s going on here? Lunney’s explanation is straightforward. Beyond a certain level of income, paying musicians more doesn’t make them work harder; it makes them work less. In other words, the most successful artists – at least in the music industry – are prone to satisfice as they get rich. Lunney presents evidence for this proposition. When revenues were high for the recording industry, as they were in the 1990s, top artists produced fewer studio albums and fewer Hot 100 hits in the first ten years of their career, compared with periods when music industry revenues were low (both in the 1960s before the advent of the federal sound recording copyright and in the online piracy era of the 2000s). During these low-revenue periods, top artists produced more studio albums and more Hot 100 hits.

Copyright may succeed in securing more money for top artists. But more money for those artists is not associated with more music. Nor does more money lead to better quality music. Indeed, there is evidence that the association, if there is one, is negative. This directly challenges the conventional incentive story that is said to justify strong copyright protection.

If Lunney is right, then it appears that strong copyright protections may get us less of precisely the music that fans find most attractive. Lunney admits that, at the same time, strong copyright laws that direct more money to artists are likely to attract more new musicians to enter the music industry. But Lunney argues, based again on data, that the benefits of this new entry are overwhelmed by the loss of productivity on the part of those satisficing popular artists.

The net result is that strong copyright makes a few star musicians richer, but results in a less creative music industry overall. And that last bit is crucial. Copyright is supposed to encourage more creativity. But what we may be getting – at least in the music industry – is exactly the opposite.

Copyright’s Excess is foundational work in the economics of intellectual property. It is also accessible to non-economists, and to those who don’t work in IP law and who haven’t thought much beyond the conventional wisdom. Lunney’s explication of the economic theory undergirding his insights is elegant, and persuasive. And the potential impact of the book is seismic. Lunney shows that copyright’s incentive effect – at least in the music industry – is complicated. Copyright does, in fact, draw new artists into the market. But it also suppresses the production of new works by established and popular artists. The result, at least by Lunney’s calculation, is a net negative for social welfare.

Lunney’s book should be widely read, especially by music industry insiders. But so far, there is little evidence that the industry is interested in grappling with Lunney’s work. That should not stop academics from closely examining what Lunney has done, but to critique it and, perhaps, to extend it.

The most obvious question that Lunney leaves unaddressed is whether the superstar-satisficing dynamic that he’s identified in music extends to other creative industries. Might we find a similar story of overpaid superstars in the movie industry? In publishing? In software? Those papers, and others, are waiting to be written.

Cite as: Christopher J. Sprigman, Lunney’s Paradox: More Copyright May Lead to Less Creativity, JOTWELL (January 18, 2019) (reviewing Glynn Lunney, Copyright's Excess: Money and Music in the US Recording Industry (2018)), https://ip.jotwell.com/lunneys-paradox-more-copyright-may-lead-to-less-creativity/.