Video Transcript

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Hey there, I’m Gary Schuster, your friendly neighborhood inventor, and this is Innovation Cafe. Today we’re going to do non-disclosure agreements in under a minute.

What is a non-disclosure agreement? Well, you might know it as an NDA, and it’s a really simple document. All it is is a contract saying, “I’m going to tell you some stuff, and if you repeat it, you can be sued.”

It has some really good uses. For example, if you want to keep your invention secret so that no one beats you to the patent office to file on it — non-disclosure agreement. If you have a trade secret and you need some help with it — non-disclosure agreement. If you want to reveal some things like pending patent applications that haven’t been filed — non-disclosure agreement.

Now, there is also a dark side to non-disclosure agreements. They can prevent you from talking about things that you really should be able to share. Every deal — yep, that’s true — every deal has the potential for an NDA to be used against you. So be careful what you sign, and make sure you understand the terms before you agree to keep something confidential.