Professor Camilla Hrdy presented new research at the 2025 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference (IPSC) on August 7, held this year at DePaul College of Law in Chicago. Her talk, titled Trade Secret Law’s On-Sale Bar, explores a novel question at the intersection of trade secret and patent law: To what degree should we permit trade secrecy protection for information that is potentially revealed in a product that has already been released to the public?
In her presentation, Professor Hrdy offered a hypothetical based on real-world litigation: Suppose a company sells a product. Later, a former employee takes design information about that product to a competitor, who uses it to develop a rival product. Can the original company still assert trade secret protection over design elements that are potentially observable in the marketed product?
This issue recently arose in Insulet Corp. v. EOFlow, Co., 104 F.4th 873, 882 (Fed. Cir. 2024), where the Federal Circuit allowed reverse engineering evidence to challenge whether features of a wearable insulin pump were truly secret, or could instead easily be discerned through reverse engineering.
Professor Hrdy’s central argument is that while trade secret law does not have a formal “on-sale bar” like patent law, it contains a functional analogue: the readily ascertainable doctrine.