While the U.S. Supreme Court contemplates its most recent case on patent subject matter eligibility, a California appellate court has just decided a case on trade secret subject matter eligibility – finding that ideas are protectable under California trade secret laws, but that the protectable information must be sufficiently specific and secret. Altavion, Inc. v. Konica Minolta Systems Laboratory Inc., — Cal.Rptr.3d —-, 2014 WL 1846104 (Cal.App. 1 Dist. 2014). Oddly, KMSL’s MoFo attorneys argued (without citation to precedent) that “[g]eneralized ideas and inventions are protectable by patents and thus cannot be trade secrets.” That argument was soundly rejected by the Altavion court, who held instead that a trade secret can include “any unpatented idea which may be used for industrial and commercial purposes.” Quoting Sinclair v. Aquarius Electronics, Inc., 42 Cal.App.3d 216 (1974). This follows the general and longstanding principle that an inventor may choose to keep her idea as a trade secret rather than file for patent protection. “[I]f a patentable idea is kept secret, the idea itself can constitute information protectable by trade secret law.” In particular, the court here upheld the trade secret rights to “design concepts” such as process flows and conceptual methods that were not tied to any particular product or software. - http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/05/secret-subject-eligibili...

------

Since, as previously noted (see Chapter 1), the filing of a patent application generally results in a loss of the underlying trade secret pertaining to the invention - https://goo.gl/bhtKgf