The Legal Protection Of Trade Secrets

The Legal Protection of Trade Secrets places trade secrets firmly in the context of intellectual property rights and commerce, and considers the complex web of law and policy underlying any decision to protect confidential information from unauthorized disclosure. It considers the position from both the situation of the employer and the employee.

This timely Handbook marks a major shift in innovation studies, moving the focus of attention from the standard intellectual property regimes of copyright, patent, and trademark, to an exploration of trade secrecy and the laws governing know-how, tacit knowledge, and confidential relationships. The editors introduce the long tradition of trade secrecy protection and its emerging importance as a focus of scholarly inquiry. The book then presents theoretical, doctrinal, and comparative considerations of the foundations of trade secrecy, before moving on to study the impact of trade secrecy regimes on innovation and on other social values. Coverage includes topics such as sharing norms, expressive interests, culture, politics, competition, health, and the environment. This important Handbook offers the first modern exploration of trade secrecy law and will strongly appeal to intellectual property academics, and to students and lawyers practicing in the intellectual property area. Professors in competition law, constitutional law and environmental law will also find much to interest them in this book, as will innovation theorists.

For business investors in China, the legal handling of trade secrets is often crucial. However, initiatives are often complicated by a patchwork trade secrets protection system – pieced together haphazardly over the last two decades and drawing on disparate elements of competition law, contract law, employment law, and criminal law – that diverges in significant ways from global standards and corresponding regimes in other countries. Now at last interested parties can benefit richly from a thorough and practical approach to the subject. This detailed analysis of China’s trade secrets law provides in-depth information and guidance on such important factors as the following: the current framework of China’s trade secrets law, its past development and its ongoing trends; legal comparison of China’s trade secrets law with various international, regional, and national schemes; what constitutes trade secrets infringement in China and what remedies are available; and the legal interaction in China between employment relations and trade secrets protection. The author pays close attention to judicial practice and precedent in the areas of civil remedies, criminal punishment, and administrative penalties. She also offers insightful proposals formulated to align China’s trade secrets law more efficiently with prevailing global standards and generally improve the mechanisms for its implementation. Corporate counsel and international lawyers concerned with intellectual property rights or labour law in China will greatly appreciate the knowledgeable guidance this book affords. They will gain a deeply informed perspective that allows them to avoid infringement, to battle it effectively if occasion arises, and to plan dispute resolution strategies for contingencies involving trade secrets protection in China.

Despite the economic relevance of trade secrets, their legal protection is not based on a robust theoretical corpus, and a large uncertainty remains regarding how they should be legally apprehended. The present book investigates the foundations of their legal protection by assessing its justifications and aims to define how this legal apprehension should be organized. The book starts with a comparative analysis of the US and the EU legal frameworks. It demonstrates the parentship existing between the two systems of protection and highlights that the incremental structuring of trade secrets protection has led to legal systems lacking broad-based conceptual foundations. In both legal orders, trade secrets rely on blurred protection, formally anchored in unfair competition, the strength of which, however, comes closer to that offered by intellectual property law. In this convoluted architecture, the judiciary is required to play a decisive role, especially at the enforcement stage. However, the absence of clarity concerning the telos of trade secrets protection leads to legal uncertainty, potentially incoherent enforcement, and, all in all, to inefficient outcomes from a welfare perspective. The book then explores a theoretical framework based on a distinction between two legal objects: the undertakings’ secret sphere and secret pieces of information. Securing the undertakings’ secret sphere appears as a condition for the competition process to happen in an economy working under structural uncertainty. It requires objective regulations enforced by public authorities. On the other hand, the legal apprehension of secret pieces of information should be considered as falling within the realm of immaterial goods regulation aiming to solve the deficit of marketability of this type of good. This might call – after conducting a careful policy trade-off – for the establishment of relative (i.e. inter partes) subjective rights.

This book assembles case law analysis and strategic advice on prosecuting and defending trade secret misappropriation actions, maintaining legally sufficient trade secret protection measures, and supervising outside attorneys in the course of litigation. This book is an invaluable resource for both firm-based litigators and in-house attorneys, and it sets a new standard for the insightful analysis of U.S. trade secret law and practice.

Trade secret protection has long been of critical strategic importance to business interests and globalization of commerce has driven an increasing need to govern the preservation of confidentiality in international business transactions. This book off