NDA = Not doing anything

On the other hand, sometimes your major sustainable competitive advantage is your IP. My current employer has developed an algorithm that pretty much blows anybody else out of the water for what we're doing and they most definitely don't want anybody else learning about it. Granted, their strategy is simply don't tell anybody (All I know is we have the algorithm, not what it is), but protection of IP can be important in some cases. If what you're protecting will be obvious once your product is out there, then yes an NDA is pointless. However, if you want to protect some behind-the-scenes technology that won't be evident to anybody using your product, then an NDA may be in order.

I agree with the post. When an idea is new there is a tendency to feel like it needs protecting. If you're serious about it, though, and get your hands dirty with the details of implementing whatever it is, NDA's seem more and more silly. By the time you get a real good idea working you won't care if the whole world knows. You know that as simple as the idea sounded, it's really thousands of hours of blood sweat dollars and tears. You'll say- "oh, you want to do it also? go right ahead and try."

Many NDAs require the disclosing party to describe, list, or specify the confidential items disclosed. But often I find when very early stage inventors ask people to sign NDAs they often fail to specify what is disclosed even though their agreements require it. If you ever have to enforce an NDA, trying to argue that the entire conversation was confidential is much harder than simply producing the list of disclosures. Also, I've never asked an investor to sign an NDA. Asking someone to sign an NDA indicates a lack of trust. IMO if you don't trust the people you are talking to you probably shouldn't be talking to them at all.

Recently I've been asked to sign NDAs as part of employment interviews. This seems to have almost become standard practice now. I don't really think this is a great idea, and I often won't take an interview that requires an NDA. But sometimes if I am certain that I won't be developing my own ideas in the field I'll sign one. Inevitably I find that these employment related NDAs are the most frivolous, silly, and irrelevant ones I sign. YMMV.

For the sake of completeness, what might be some of the situations where an NDA or secrecy of the idea is important?

I'm guessing an example would be if you are entering negotiations to be bought out by a public company.

It is easy to come up with ideas, but some ideas are better than others. Maybe I can agree to the level that "ideas in nuthsells" are worthless. For example anyone can have the idea to "create a really elegant computer", yet most people agree that only Steve Jobs can pull it off (just look at the TV computer design challenge by intel - so depressing). But I think in his mind the idea is more than just the nutshell description. And having THAT right idea doesn't seem to be trivial to me.

About an year ago, a company hired me to code a corporate instant messenger. There was no technologically innovative angle to it; yet, my employer insisted that I sign an NDA before the project be disclosed to me. The process took about three weeks and wasted time that could've been spent on actually coding it.

In my opinion, NDA's are more useful when they are used to protect a "technology" rather than a "product".

The worst thing to me about the rise of the NDA is the return of the colloquial phrase, "i could tell you... but i'd hafta kill you"

:-P