Company: CIFRW
Filing Date: 2025-02-25
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001819989-25-000005
Chunk: 156

Company: Cipher Mining Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-25
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 156
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 our trade secrets and provide them to a competitor, and the recourse we take against such misconduct may not provide an adequate remedy to protect our interests fully, because enforcing a claim that a party illegally disclosed or misappropriated a trade secret can be difficult, expensive and time consuming, and the outcome is unpredictable. Thus, if any of our trade secrets were to be disclosed or misappropriated, our competitive position could be harmed. In addition to the risk of misappropriation and unauthorized disclosure, our competitors may develop similar or better methods independently in a manner that could prevent legal recourse by us, which could result in costly process redesign efforts or other competitive harm. Furthermore, any of our intellectual property rights could be challenged, invalidated, circumvented, infringed, diluted, disclosed or misappropriated and adequate legal recourse may be unavailable. Thus, there can be no assurance that our trade secrets or other intellectual property rights will be sufficient to protect against competitors operating their business in a manner that is substantially similar to us.

Third parties may claim that we are infringing upon, misappropriating or otherwise violating their intellectual property rights, which may prevent or inhibit our operations and cause us to suffer significant litigation expense even if these claims have no merit.

Our commercial success depends on our ability to operate without undue cost and distraction of claims that we are infringing the intellectual property rights of third parties. However, third parties may own patents (or have pending patent applications that later result in patents) that our operations may infringe. In addition, third parties may purchase patents for the purpose of asserting claims of infringement and attempting to extract license fees via settlements from us. There also could be patents that we believe we do not infringe, but that we may ultimately be found to infringe. Further, because patents can take many years to issue, there may be currently pending applications of which we are unaware that may later result in issued patents that its operations infringe.

Finally, third parties could accuse us of misappropriating their trade secrets. Any claims of patent infringement or trade secret misappropriation, even claims without merit, could be costly and time-consuming to defend and could require us to divert resources away from operations. In addition, if any third party has a meritorious or successful claim that we are infringing their intellectual property, we may be forced to redesign our operations or secure a license from such third parties, which may be costly or impractical. We also may be subject to significant damages or injunctions that may cause a material adverse effect to our business and operations