In less than a decade, the Los Angeles-based firm has collected a roster of distinguished area clients such as UCSD Connect, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, Corvas Inc., Callaway Golf and First Virtual Holdings. That can only be good news for San Diego's hungry, fast-growing technology companies. Olson has more than two decades of trial experience, including appellate arguments at the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the United States and European patent offices. In layman's terms, an idea can't be patented if it is obvious to someone with expertise in a given field. Patents aren't the ideal protection for all intellectual property matters, Olson says.
Patents expire, and two decades after the application is filed, the patent becomes public domain.
Not only can anybody use the idea, the patent application tells exactly how to do it. In cases where an idea is very unlikely to be duplicated, it can be kept as a trade secret, hidden from the competition and disclosed under rigid nondisclosure agreements only to those who need to know. Trade secrets never expire. The formula for Coke is a classic example of a trade secret, Olson says. Locally, Callaway Golf protects much of its technology as trade secrets.