News of the day... Patents vs. trade secrets: Protecting your IP Julie Fortier Ottawa Business Journal Staff

"In the software field, it depends on how much a company is planning to release to the public anyways and how easily something may be to reverse engineer. If you want to keep something secret, the protection is indefinite as long as you keep it a secret. (But) if someone independently comes up with the idea, you can't say they stole it from you." Mr. Behmann gave Google.com as an example of a trade secret that has worked very well for years. "You put in your search terms and you get the results, but there is a lot of stuff that goes on in the background. In their case, the way they rank the search results, they have kept that secret because it's not something that people can easily get at, it's all on their own servers." Mr. Hogg agreed that sometimes a patent isn't always the way to go. "Sometimes we look at something and say 'this is going to be negative value for us to patent this.' We're better off not telling our competition what the questions are," he said.