Are there examples of confidentiality clauses which still allow some public disclosures?

Question

Speaking about typical IT contract - I'm looking for an inspiration on how to create a confidentiality clause that's not that strict.

It should cover 2 points of view:

• contractor wants to have right to speak about work he did and was responsible for, like "I did module B, that allowed this and that. This was a hard task, and this is how I approached the problem. I used pattern ABC"
• client wants to make sure that no sensitive and secret information is disclosed or for example big portion of source code is not published (but doesn't care if purely technical code snippet is discussed in a blogpost).

One option would be to limit confidentiality to secret documents, but not many companies do that.

Are there any examples of confidentiality clause not being that strict, and allowing to speak publicly about the job being done for the company? Or is it generally impossible to to create something like that?

Answer 1

Confidentially agreements are limited to confidential information. Information that is not transmitted in confidence is not subject to any non-disclosure agreement.

Things that are not confidential, like generally known algorithms or programming patterns cannot be subject to a confidentiality agreement. Similarly, publicly available information (like EA makes games and Google makes search engines [among other things]) is not confidential. Further, confidential information must be specific and transmitted is such a way that the recipient knows (or reasonably should have known) that the information is confidential: you cannot tell an employee "everything we tell you is confidential" because a) it isn't and b) it places an unrealistic burden on the employee to determine what is and isn't confidential.