A Brief History of Trade Secret Law briefhistory.pdf

Everyone has heard of tradesecrets. Employees areoften asked to sign anagreement regarding theirprotection, whereas employers often worry that employees will move to a competitor and take the company’s trade secrets with them. The Internet appears to contain information on every company now in business (and many no longer in business). Much of the public corporate information now available online would have been viewed as trade secret information just a few years ago. What is a trade secret today? Are trade secrets still important? Are there any left to protect? If yes, how can those secrets be protected in today’s information age? Part one of this article (in BioProcess International’s October issue) discussed legal definitions of trade secrets in the United States and their implications for protection. Part two discusses federal enforcement provisions and specific methods companies can use to protect their trade secrets. THE ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1996 (EEA) Although the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) was a valuable update of the laws designed to protect trade secrets, clearly more was needed, particularly on a federal level, because the states did not uniformly adopt the act. In 1996, Congress passed the EEA to close a federal enforcement gap in this important area of intellectual property law and in recognition of the increasing importance of the value of intellectual property in general (and trade secrets in particular) to the economic well-being and security of the United States. The EEA’s definition of trade secrets is even broader than those of the UTSA (1) and the 1939 Restatement of Torts (2). It defines trade secrets as All forms and types of financial, business, scientific, technical, economic, or engineering information, including patterns, plans, compilations, program devices, formulas, designs, prototypes, methods, techniques, processes, procedures, programs, or codes, whether tangible or intangible, and whether or how stored, compiled, or memo