On December 5th, 2019, Crowell & Moring’s Brussels office, in cooperation with the Belgian Institute for In-House Counsel, hosted a deep dive session into the EU Trade Secrets Directive and the changes this legal framework has brought about since it went into effect in 2016.
Crowell & Moring attorneys including Partners Jan-Diederik Lindemans and Emmanuel Plasschaert, Senior Counsel Gunther Meyer, and Associates Judith Bussé and Evelien Jamaels guided participants through best practices on maximizing protection of commercially valuable information under the legal framework, explained how it impacts companies’ relationships with employees and contractors, and finally discussed how the framework will co-exist with upcoming EU rules on whistleblowing. Participants especially appreciated the insights shared by Belgian State Security Counter-Intelligence Coordinator, L. Van Der Haeghen, about commonly used techniques to steal or otherwise unlawfully obtain trade secrets during the discussion.
Below are a few key points participants took away from the discussion:
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On June 28, 2019, the Luxembourgish Mémorial published the Law of June 26, 2019 on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information better known as trade secrets implementing the EU Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943 after a one year delay. The recent Luxembourgish Law is a literal transposition of the EU Directive and provides a legal definition of “trade secrets,” which was up until now only defined by the courts. The EU Directive defined “trade secret” as information that (i) is secret, i.e. not publicly known or readily accessible to persons normally dealing with this kind of information, (ii) has commercial value because it is and remains a secret, and (iii) has been subject to reasonable steps under the circumstances, by the person lawfully in control of the information, to keep it secret. This definition thus includes any kind of sensitive business information that is kept secret by reasonable measures, such as market studies, business plans, pricing information, etc.
On April 1st, 2019, the Greek Law 4605/2019 implementing the Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943 was published in the Official Gazette. This new law creates a framework for the protection of business information and know-how. Before that date, Greek law did not provide for any legal protection against the expropriation or theft of for example software
On April 16, 2019, the EU Parliament approved a draft directive for new harmonized rules on the protection of whistleblowers. The Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Protection of Persons reporting on Breaches of Union Law (the “Whistleblowing Directive”) creates EU-wide minimum standards to protect persons disclosing information to which
Germany recently adopted new legislation governing trade secret protection. The “Gesetz zum Schutz von Geschäftsgeheimnissen” (or Trade Secrets Act) implements European Union Directive 2016/943, which is intended to harmonize trade secrets law across the European Union. While many of the core provisions of the Trade Secrets Act will be familiar to practitioners of U.S. trade
The Criminal Court of Mechelen (Belgium) ruled in favor of Bofin Biscuits against a former production assistant accused of having stolen the assistant director of the cookie baker’s laptop. The laptop allegedly contained the secret recipes of all the cookies produced by Bofin Biscuits. This case is interesting because of the nature of the secrets and also when compared to that of the