As many have mentioned there is a big difference between an NDA and a patent. An NDA allows two parties to discuss confidential information. In industry if you have a product and you would like to discuss the confidential information with other parties for example other companies you make work with or license the product, in order to keep the information confidential you need to put in place an NDA to protect your IP. There are one-way NDAs where one party is disclosing the confidential information to another party and two-way/ mutual NDAs where both parties are disclosing confidential information. At Sloan Kettering we have over 300 NDAs signed a year. We put an NDA in place if we have filed a patent on a technology and especially when we have not filed a patent. As Dr. Simon mentions the term of the NDA is very important. For example if its only for a year, then that means the company you discussed confidential information then they can take it and run a year after the NDA. At Sloan our standard is 5-7 years and that the confidentially provisions remain confidential for another 3-5 years after the termination. These are standards agreements but the negating usually happens in regards to the term of the NDA. NDAs/CDAs and patents are both ways to protect IP which is great but they are in no way substitutes.

US Patent law is now first to file, which means if someone submits a provisional patent application a day before you submit, they obtain the patent. Its no longer looking at dates in lab notebooks, its first date to file. So this means if you have an invention you should always have a CDA/NDA in place in order to discuss with other parties like investors or companies to collaborate or license but if you have something novel, non-obvious, and useful you should file a patent. A CDA protects the confidential information you provide to others whereas the patent gives you the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention. So you will probably use a CDA for discussions of your product with potential investors/collaborators, and if you filed a patent you can even reference the title of the technology and invention record number. At Sloan each technology has an assigned invention number and that is then associated with the IP details regarding filing stage. Overall NDAs and patents are ways to protect IP, but are very different.