Stolen business idea

Have you signed the NDA? If you have and you break it then expect to be pursued in the civil courts.

Also, you obviously have some form of relationship with the company, or you would not know. Are you an employee, an ex employee?

And what makes you think they are unaware of the new application of their tech? If you are an employee, again, that would be covered by your employment contract. If you are not an employee then you do not know everything that they are doing.

If you continue on this path you could well be playing with fire.

Also, I notice you say you have an idea for a product and continue by saying that this company have developed a similar product, so it does not really seem to be your idea?

HappyUser wrote: »

Also, how would I break the NDA? I am supposedly the one disclosing my idea to them, not them to me.

Sorry, sounded like you had had an idea looking at their tech.

Although that does seem to be the case. Again, I would have to ask how you know they have not already had the idea as it seems that you have no knowledge of their product apart from possibly as a consumer?

Anyway, NDAs are standard, we make our distributors sign them, and anyone involved in any form of development. It is protection for the manufacturer, there is a chance they may wish to discuss your idea and that might mean revealing things about the product that are not generally known and they do not want to be known.

If you are so worried about them replicating your idea when the NDA runs out then get a copy of your idea and any plans you may have and post it to yourself tracked, also mentioning the names of anyone you deal with, make sure you keep all the information about the tracking etc, print off the tracking details from the website, and keep it all in a file unopened.

As I said, they may well be working on the idea you have already, have you given them any details yet? If not then you are at a stalemate, if you don't want to sign the NDA then you will never know if they would take on your idea.

We are constantly developing our products, constantly finding new uses for them, it could be someone would look at one of our products and say that would be good for X, then they see it being used for X a couple of years down the road and suddenly come up with the idea that they actually told us about it but cannot find out when or where but figure it is worth a go anyway, and start shouting that it was their idea, but we can turn around and say we started developing this by X date and would be able to show this (in this case anyway), people have the same ideas all the time.