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Entertainment Industry: Take Note Of Surge in Trade Secrets Litigation

By Zach Warren
September 02, 2017

Intellectual property battles in technology, including in the entertainment industry, are nothing new, but their nature might be shifting. These days, many of the big IP litigation battles have nothing to do with patents, trademarks or copyrights. Instead, it's all about trade secrets.

Every company has trade secrets in some form that separate a company's products and internal processes from those of a competitor. With technology, however, the risks of compromising those secrets are higher than ever before, in part because of the nature of computer code, but also the high level of access partners have to one another's systems.

“If you think about a car, as the end user or recipient of the car, you can use it without understanding all of the manufacturing processes that went into producing it,” Monica Greenberg, executive vice president of business affairs and general counsel at LivePerson, told Entertainment Law & Finance affiliate Legaltech News. “I think it's more common in the technology industry, particularly in cloud services, which LivePerson is, that the user — in this case, our customers or other third parties in the ecosystem — gain some level of exposure under a trusted relationship.”

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