You’re starting to get the idea these are really efficiency tools. The Hague Agreement allows users to save time and money by enabling them to easily and swiftly acquire design protection in multiple markets. Next slide. Now trade secrets, you’ve probably heard a lot about trade secrets. This is information that first has to have commercial value, not generally known and then you have to take reasonable steps to preserve the confidentiality, to preserve its secrecy. Next slide. So common uses are formula, think of Coke, the formula for Coke is probably the most famous formula but can also be manufacturing process which that’s obviously a big one but things people might not think about are things like business strategies, the customer lists. Obviously your design concepts and business management information so lots of uses for trade secrets, highly valuable intellectual property. The important thing is remembering what steps to take to protect it. Keep it secret, all right, here we got trade secrets versus patents. Usually there’s a trade-off if you have let’s say you make some new product. Often times what you’ve obviously if it’s new then nobody else knows about it so the question is a lot of times do you want to get a patent on what you’ve invented or do you want to keep it a secret? So there’s we have some ways to compare those. First of all a trade secret can be indefinite so the time period for protection as long as it’s not discovered could go on forever. With a patent you’ve got the 20-year term. If it’s a trade secret, it’s not registered or disclosed obviously otherwise it would defeat the purpose of being a trade secret whereas your patent is publicly disclosed.
You can do that so in your process of getting into a market, we encourage you to once you’ve done your review and your research online and you’re working with a U.S. export assistance center expert who’s also linked to our overseas offices, there’s a really great tool they have called the international expansion blueprint. And if you’ve listened to some of the earlier presentations earlier in the month, you probably heard about it. It’s a tool because it gives you almost a checklist to make sure you’re covering all of your bases on all of the important topics and once you’ve done all of that prep work so I’m leading-up to someplace here, you really need to get on an airplane and go visit the country, the market that you want to develop. There really is no other way to make sure. Now it depends on what your approach to the market is. If you’re really seriously wanted to be in the market and build-up your presence and your sales there, you need to go. There is no way around that in my mind because you need to get a feel for the culture, for the people, get a feel for the market and you want to be able to meet face-to-face with potential representatives, agents or distributors in that market. We can help you with that process. We have services designed for that but whether you use our services or not, it’s really important to go there in person and let me give you a little story about why it’s so important. I have met, unfortunately, on more than one occasion a company that comes to me and says in an overseas in a market and they say gosh, I’m really having problems with my local distributor. They won’t sell my product. Even though I gave them an exclusive distributorship agreement and I said gosh, oh well how did you choose that distributor? Well, I was at a trade