Interesting IP issue at CIRM

from the californiastemcellreport:

Don Gibbons, chief communications officer for CIRM, said in an email,

“After your inquiry, we contacted Square 1 to see if they would reconsider their request to treat the pricing information as confidential, in the interest of public disclosure. Square 1 has agreed that we should produce an unredacted copy of attachment B to the contract, but they would like to note that they sought to protect the pricing information because they do regard it as proprietary (i.e., it is not known to their competitors and could give them a competitive advantage), but that they will waive their objection to producing the information in the interests of transparency. The unredacted document is attached.

“CIRM staff initially redacted the pricing information at Square 1’s request, but we remain responsible for deciding whether to honor such requests. We could have asked Square 1 to waive its request before we produced the document. In retrospect, we should have slowed down and taken the time to do that.”


One inquires: can what a bank charges, or a schedule for charging, a public entity (here California's CIRM) be considered proprietary information?