Prof. Camilla Hrdy presented her work on trade secrets, contracts, and generative artificial intelligence at the Hofstra Intellectual Property Law Colloquium, on October 7, 2024. Prof. Hrdy argues that trade secret law is not “in crisis” as a result of generative AI. In fact, many of the established rules developed for older technologies, including traditional software, apply straightforwardly to generative AI. Instead, generative AI raises the same issues for trade secrecy that software did: It’s a classic overprotection story. Companies can rely on a combination of trade secrecy and contracts to protect their technology as “trade secrets,” long after factual secrecy has ended.
Prof. Hrdy’s most recent article on these issues can be downloaded here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4879849