People who steal trade secrets can also face criminal penalties in addition to civil liability. An invention assignment agreement requires an employee to assign to the employer all the inventions conceived, developed or created by the employee while employed by the company. Some states such as California will limit the scope of these agreements to preventits application to inventions the employee developed entirely on his or her own timewithout using the employer's facilities or trade secrets unless the invention relates to the employer's business or research and development. Invention assignment agreements may also require the employee to assign any inventions made for a period of time, such as one year, after leaving the company. These agreements may be valid though they are most likely to be restricted in time and usually to under a year.
Courts narrowly interpret the rule however.
Likewise, under copyright law, if an employee creates a work while acting in the scope andemployment of his or her employment, the copyright to that work belongs to the employer. The law of trade secrets dates back to Roman law which punished a person who induced another person to divulge secrets relating tothe master's commercial affairs. This update reviews a recent Ninth Circuit case holding that a plaintiff s failure to designate its trade secret with specificity upon a court order to do so precluded it from later relying on that trade secret to support its misappropriation claim. NELA is the country's only professional organization that is exclusively comprised of lawyers who represent individual employees in cases involving employment discrimination, wrongful termination, employee benefits and other employment-related matters. In general, it is perfectly legitimate to recruit and hire competitors' employees.