Opinion ID: 1989929
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: Revere's cross appeal.

Text: On its cross appeal, plaintiff Revere raises several assignments of error concerning the district court's instructions to the jury on the misappropriation of trade secrets issue. Instruction No. 18, defined a trade secret as any formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process which: 1. Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by persons other than the Plaintiff, and; 2. Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy. The jury was also instructed that in determining whether the hole size and other information constituted a trade secret, it could consider among other things, [t]he ease or difficulty with which the information could be properly acquired or duplicated by others. A. Revere's first assignment of error regarding jury instructions is that the district court erred in refusing to instruct the jury, as to the limited scope of a reverse engineering defense. [8] Revere asked the court to instruct the jury that [t]he fact that one could have obtained a trade secret lawfully is not a defense if one does not actually use proper means to acquire the information. Revere's theory was that Deere could not avoid liability for misappropriation of Revere's trade secrets by asserting that the information was discoverable by reverse engineering or destructive testing because Deere offered no evidence at trial that it in fact used such methods. We conclude that instruction No. 18 adequately stated the law. Instruction No. 18 is essentially a direct quote of Iowa Code section 550.2(4)(a) and (b). Additionally, Deere presented no evidence it performed reverse engineering and thus did not argue it had a defense to liability for misappropriation if the jury so found. Rather, Deere's contentions concerning reverse engineering went to the initial question of whether Revere's information related to hole size, hole placement, placement of gauges, production methods, and products costs constituted protectable trade secrets, a prerequisite to finding that Deere misappropriated Revere's trade secrets. We believe that the question of whether Revere's alleged trade secrets could be discovered by alternative methods was adequately covered in Instruction No. 18 and we therefore find no error concerning the court's refusal to give Revere's requested jury instruction. B. Revere's second assignment of error is that the court's instruction regarding the definition of trade secret was too narrow and that the court erred in refusing to include the following language requested by Revere: Business information may also fall within the definition of a trade secret, including such matters as maintenance of data on customer lists and needs, source of supplies, confidential costs, price data and figures. Trade secrets can range from customer information, to financial information, to information about manufacturing processes, to the composition of products. As noted above, instruction No. 18 essentially quotes the definition of trade secret stated in Iowa Code section 550.2(4). We therefore conclude that the court's instruction regarding definition of a trade secret was a correct statement of the law and adequately covered the concepts mentioned in Revere's requested instruction. C. Revere's third assignment of error is that the district court erred in failing to instruct the jury that [r]easonable precautions to protect the secrecy of the trade secret will suffice, and that secrecy of the information need not be absolute. We find no merit to this assignment of error because Instruction No. 18 told the jury that a trade secret is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy. As a whole, we conclude that the instructions correctly and adequately stated the law. We find no error on this issue and affirm.