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by staticautomatic 805 days ago
A customer can misappropriate a vendor’s trade secret and price lists can be trade secrets. As a general matter these propositions easily fall within the relevant laws (UTSA, DTSA, NY common law) and there are plenty of cases around the country supporting that. If you have a different opinion, all I can say is that I believe you’d find out in court that you’re wrong.
1 comments
CPLX 805 days ago
Right but something that I do isn’t your secret. It can’t be in an arms length customer/vendor relationship.

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.

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staticautomatic 805 days ago
Don’t patronize me.

You’re basically arguing that the act of purchasing renders the NDA void. Good luck with that.

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CPLX 805 days ago
Have you ever read an NDA? They usually go something like this:

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.

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