Business
Today we're going to talk very briefly about online conferences and the potential loss of intellectual property rights and the risks that you face. In this new day and age of COVID-19 and Zoom conferences, people have been bombing Zoom conferences logging in when they don't have the right to, even password protected conferences get photobombed, like Zoombombed, I guess. First, you might not always know who's in your Zoom conference. So it's a good idea offhand to ask everybody to introduce themselves and make sure that every little shiny group that's on the phone is accounted for. You know who everybody is. If you disclose something in a Zoom conference that's right now a company trade secret or one of your employees does, you could potentially lose that trade secret for good. Second, another thing that is happening in this day and age is people are sharing things online because they can't see each other and that can include inventions. And that might mean an almost instant loss of patent rights if you happen to accidentally publish something to a third party. Be careful about what you do, know who's in your Zoom conferences, and think about using nondisclosure agreements, taking other precautions, especially in this day and age when you can't see people face-to-face as much as you'd like to.