prices aren't a trade secret and difficult to enforce even if its covered under an NDA
Source: I'm a 3L about to graduate with an IP specialization and got an award for being the best student in my trade secret law class.
- Ahern Rentals, 59 F.4th 948 (2023)
- Wilmington Star-News, 125 N.C. App. 174 (1997)
- Ingram, 260 Md. App. 122 (2023)
- Intertek Testing Servs., 443 F. Supp. 3d 303 (2020)
I’ll save myself the trouble of doing your research for you and ask if any of these involved a fact pattern where customers of a service sharing price info with each other is considered a trade secret.
Here’s a hint: if I am the customer and I am describing something that I myself did, specifically the outcome of a business decision I made on how much to pay, that’s not someone else’s trade secret.
You can make an argument that internal documents of a vendor are trade secrets, maybe. But you can’t say that a piece of information in the record of MY company, namely how much I decided to pay for their software, is a trade secret that belongs to someone else.
You’re learning how to be a lawyer quickly. It’s really common for attorneys to cite cases where the fact pattern doesn’t line up at all and hope nobody reads them. But if you are sure there is good precedent for this specific point then post it. I doubt that’s the case for the obvious reasons I outlined above.
You’re basically arguing that the act of purchasing renders the NDA void. Good luck with that.
For purposes of this Agreement, "Confidential Information" shall include any information, material, data, or know-how, including trade secrets and proprietary information, that is not generally known to the public and that is disclosed, either written or orally, to be or appears to a reasonable person to be proprietary or confidential.
The price that my company paid to purchase someone else's software was not "disclosed" to me. I created the information myself, when I made the decision to purchase it. The company didn't convey, transmit, or pass the information to me. My act of deciding to purchase the software created the information, which did not exist prior to my purchase decision, and it's information about me and my company's actions and by definition can't be someone else's proprietary data.
> Trial court did not err in finding the plaintiff took reasonable steps under the circumstances to maintain the secrecy of its trade secrets, including internal customer and pricing information, as required by MUTSA, CL § 11-1201(e)(2), where the plaintiff restricted access to the information on a company database; an employee handbook prohibited employees from removing sensitive categories of information
This seems very different from me getting a quote from you and then at a bar saying yeah XYZ enterprise plan costs $42,000/year
Is there a basis for this in recent case law? And how difficult would it be to enforce against a 3rd party actively publishing pricing, and therefore competitive, strategy?
Nope I'm not staying they should shut down or they will get sued, but they should do the sensible thing and talk to a good lawyer
prices wouldn't be enforceable because knowing how much you charge isn't revealing anything proprietary (because you have to tell your customers in order to get them to make a decision).
Also not exactly possible to expect confidentiality around prices because your banks and their staff will see it..
But I can argue that pricing is part of my strategy and revealing pricing information in cases where I explicitly forbade it is potentially damaging because it allows a competitor to undercut me. I'd be surprised if they do go after a client, but my concern for these guys is they are not a client. They are an aggregator of this information. If any of these quotes were given with the caveat that pricing should not be shared, then a named company who's on the pricier side might have a good leg to stand on arguing this site damaged their business with what amounts to a trade secret (pricing strategy). At three very least or could result in a letter and headaches. Asking for who gave the information is something I would totally see too, especially if this was a client who jumped ship, if anything else just as a scare tactic/revenge
So, allows them to compete with you...
IANAL, and don't know how the law actually applies to this, but prohibiting customers or potential customers from disclosing price information clearly seems anti-competitive to me. And in some ways it is even worse than giving you an advantage for you over your competitors, if all your competitors also keep pricing a trade secret. In that case it gives you and your "competitors" an advantage against the customer, because the customer can't effectively compare prices, at least without expending considerable effort, which can result in the customer paying more. Especially for smaller companies with less negotiating power.
There's a big difference between seeing data in the course of your job, and being legally able to share it!
Something can’t be a trade secret if it’s not a secret at all, and if you’re the seller, and the information is a description of something someone else did (ie how much the buyer paid) then it’s not your secret to defend.
Not being allowed to expose the buying price of a service would go against many of these procedures/obligations.
We could look at it the same way disclosing one's salary can't be illegal: how do you then apply for a loan for instance ?