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would you steal the recipe for coke if you were a secretary or temp there?
Coke re-evaluates trade secret protection
from yahoo
By HARRY R. WEBER, AP Business Writer
1 hour, 28 minutes ago
ATLANTA - It wasn't locked up in a bank vault like the recipe for its flagship soda brand. Instead, prosecutors say a new product sample at the heart of a corporate espionage case that erupted this week at The Coca-Cola Co. was accessible to a secretary.
The episode has made Coke re-evaluate its safeguards for protecting trade secrets, and other corporations ask whether they should do the same — even as the secretary's lawyer wonders what all the fuss is about.
"It's something that's made everyone I know their hair stand on end," said corporate security consultant Richard Heffernan, who works for trade group ASIS International.
Experts say the important thing is to have tough employee screening and to catalog what secrets you don't want others to know.
"One of the things that gets less importance than it really should get is we're really careful when we hire a CFO that is going to handle money or a director of research, but I think we need to pay more attention to the support people that have access to this information," Heffernan said.
Stealing trade secrets is not uncommon in a competitive corporate culture where heavy premiums are placed on bringing an innovative new product or device or technology to the market first.
In New Jersey, an electronics company executive was charged last year with hacking into the computer system of a rival firm to steal its customer and supplier lists so he could undercut the competitor's prices.
In 2004, a man was arrested in Florida after being accused of selling a stolen set of Pratt & Whitney blueprints for precision tools needed to repair a commercial jet engine to a Belgian firm. And two Michigan men were charged in 2003 with trying to steal and sell company secrets from auto-parts maker Visteon Corp.
In the Coke espionage case, Joya Williams is accused of stealing confidential documents and a sample of a new Coke product from the Atlanta-based beverage giant while working as an administrative assistant to the company's global brand director. Two men, Ibrahim Dimson and Edmund Duhaney, are charged along with her with trying to sell the items to PepsiCo Inc.
Richard Darwin, an intellectual property lawyer in San Francisco, said biotechnology firms and software companies that maintain confidential information used by employees and engineers often put that information on a highly secure computer network that is password-protected to limit access.
Other companies make employees sign confidentiality agreements promising not to divulge trade secrets, even after they leave their jobs.
"I think it's fair to say that taking steps to safeguard intellectual property, in particular the trade secrets of a company, is absolutely critical, especially here where those trade secrets relate directly to the success of a product," Darwin said.
Coke's general counsel, Geoff Kelly, sent a memo to employees Friday reminding them of just that fact.
Kelly said company policy states that any materials classified as "confidential" must be secured in locked offices and drawers when not in use. He said materials marked "restricted" must be encrypted for electronic transmission, including e-mail, and hard copies must be secured when not in use. Kelly also urged employees to come forward if they see someone doing something inappropriate.
Pharmacist John Pemberton's syrup formula that became known as Coca-Cola is locked away in an Atlanta bank. Pepsi officials have declined to talk about their information security measures.
Williams' lawyer said after a court appearance Thursday that she wants to have the product in question tested to defend her client against accusations that she likened to a "spy novel." She said the product might not be as secret as Coke says, given that her client had access to it as part of her job.
While anyone could take a Coke product currently on the market and have it tested to see what's in it, the larger concern among companies such as Coke is preventing the product itself from being known by the competition before it is released, said John Sicher, an industry analyst and editor of Beverage Digest.
"It's not about what the formula is, it's about what the product is," Sicher said. "When Coke several years ago came out with Vanilla Coke, they wanted that to be ahead of everybody else doing a vanilla cola. So, it's about what the product is. The innovation itself is what they try to keep secret."
The Coke case has renewed a discussion of protecting corporate trade secrets.
At Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., the telecommunications provider regularly examines its process for assuring that employees understand the importance of not revealing the company's technology secrets, spokesman Joe Chandler said.
UPS Inc., the Atlanta-based shipping carrier, requires management employees to attend a class every year that reminds them about the importance of protecting trade secrets and also of not accepting information about a competitor, spokesman Norm Black said.
But all the protection in the world might not stop a determined thief.
"The lab at Los Alamos can't protect every secret from someone who wants to engage in misconduct, and no company could," said Sicher.
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Originally Posted by Mirren
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