Decision Insights: Publicly Available Ingredients Do Not Invalidate Source Code's Trade Secret Status

The recent decision in Decision Insights, Inc. v. Sentia Group, Inc., No. 09-2300 (4th Cir., Jan. 28, 2011), features two reversals of district court decisions involving a bedrock trade secrets principle: just because a secret recipe uses publicly available ingredients, it does not necessarily mean that the recipe is not a secret.

As in the recent cases involving Goldman Sachs and Société Générale covered by this Blog, the crux of the of corporate espionage claims in Decision Insights involve the purported pilfering of computer source code against the familiar backdrop of sharp competition between two companies and employee defection. As described in the appellate court's opinion, Decision Insights developed and owned software called the "Dynamic Expected Utility Model." It is an analytical tool used to prepare negotiating strategies using modeling techniques similar to game theory analyses: the application "assesses risk, compares the impact of