Do You Have to Disclose Info About Your Intellectual Property?

There are situations when businesses do not want to share certain proprietary information with the world. For example, a company might decide to forgo pursuing patent protection and try to keep a technology or formula as a trade secret for as long as possible, as patents get published in order to disclose their "secret sauce" to the public at large in exchange for a limited-term monopoly. A well-known example of this is the formula for Coca-Cola®, which has been successfully maintained as a trade secret for over a century by elaborate means and procedures. The patent laws in the U.S. effectively prevent someone from treating an invention as a trade secret while commercially exploiting said invention for more than a year, so if a party attempts to keep an invention as a trade secret for more than a year, then suddenly tries to seek patent protection if the trade secret gets out, that is not legal, as allowing someone to do such a thing would in essence give the party an extended term of exclusive patent rights beyond what Congress intended.