Trade Secrets Legal Protection

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.

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 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.

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

Edited by leading IP practitioner Trevor Cook from Bird & Bird, this important title demystifies the law of trade secrets in over 30 jurisdictions, covering substantive and procedural aspects of both criminal and civil law and exploring the final remedies available. Designed to provide clear, comprehensive and practical guidance, this is a powerful tool for anyone requiring a broader and fuller understanding of trade secret protection globally.