ABSTRACT
Under the Constitution, Congress was told to create a system of promoting and protecting inventors and authors, that is, establishing a system of patents and copyrights. A patent application is a public record, and when the life of the patent monopoly expires, other that are fully entitled to use the knowledge which is contained in the patent. Copyrights protect the specific expression of an idea; they do not protect the idea itself. A trademark is registered in order to prevent other people from, in effect, “misbranding” the origin of a particular item. The only legal protection that a trade secret receives is that contracts requiring that one party not disclose trade secrets learned from the other party are enforceable, both by money damages for breech and by injunction to prevent prospective breech. The Uniform Commercial Code sets forth how contracts are formed between parties of roughly equal bargaining power, how they shall be interpreted and enforced.
