Crowell & Moring invites you to attend the third installment of our “Safeguarding Your Secrets in the Digital Age” webinar series: How to Work with Third-Parties, Including Those Internationally, taking place on Tuesday, November 12th at 12:00 pm (EDT).
During this webinar, Crowell & Moring Counsel Raija Horstman and Associate Judith Bussé will
After posts considering confidentiality protections under the EU Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943 when litigating in various jurisdictions, we next turn to how these issues arise in the context of arbitration.
Where trade secrets are protected by a contract, an opportunity arises for parties to consider alternative dispute resolution mechanisms including arbitration and whether to adopt express rules in arbitration that protect confidentiality.
Continue Reading
In our next post on the EU Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943, we turn to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the EU Trade Secrets Directive was implemented in 2018 by the Act on the Protection of Trade Secrets (Wet bescherming bedrijfsgeheimen) and led to amendments to Dutch procedural law including those related to confidentiality clubs. For example, access to alleged trade secrets introduced in proceedings is granted to at least one person of the opposing party and that party’s lawyer under confidentiality restrictions. (Article 1019ib, Dutch Code of Civil Procedure). Depending on the nature of the trade secret, however, the court may order that access to certain documents be limited to only a lawyer or another authorized representative but not a representative of the opposing party. (Article 22a(3), Dutch Code of Civil Procedure).
Continue Reading
The EU Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943 contains a variety of confidentiality protections expressly protecting the publicity of the proceedings because “[t]he prospect of losing the confidentiality of a trade secret in the course of legal proceedings often deters legitimate trade secret holders from instituting legal proceedings to defend their trade secrets, thus jeopardising the effectiveness of the measures, procedures and remedies provided for. For this reason, it is necessary to establish, subject to appropriate safeguards ensuring the right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial, specific requirements aimed at protecting the confidentiality of the litigated trade secret in the course of legal proceedings instituted for its defence.” Article 9 of the Directive specifically required EU member states to implement rules creating such protections, such as by restricting access to hearings and creating so-called “confidentiality rings” or “confidentiality clubs” limiting the dissemination of confidential information and documents to designated persons.
The United Kingdom’s implementing law, the Trade Secrets (Enforcement, etc.) Regulations 2018, requires that the court have the power to restrict access to documents containing alleged trade secrets and to hearings. s. 10(5). There is already significant maturity in the kinds of confidentiality protections available in English litigation so this is unlikely to lead to significant change. Although the principle of open justice is a fundamental feature of the legal system and departures are permitted only if necessary in the interests of justice, exceptions and restrictions to openness and respect for confidentiality are actually already well-established in the United Kingdom. See McKillen v Misland (Cyprus) Investments Ltd and others [2012] EWHC 1158 (Ch).
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
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 “fig spread”-case discussed here two weeks ago. It also confirms that trade secret misappropriation cases do not necessary only involve complex matters on state of the art technology owned by large multinationals.
The facts of the case are rather straight-forward. On November 12, 2013 the assistant-director of Bofin Biscuits noticed that his laptop had gone missing during his absence from November 6 to November 11. Images from the surveillance video system of Bofin Biscuits showed that the actual taking of the laptop had not been filmed. The camera hanging outside the assistant-director’s office did show a production assistant walking down the hallway where the office was located, entering it and leaving with something clearly hidden under his coat. During the trial the production-assistant did not contradict that he was the person that had been filmed, but he denied that he had taken the laptop. When asked what he then was hiding under his coat, he claimed not to recall anything.
For the public prosecutor this was a clear cut case and he requested the court to sentence the former production assistant to a six month effective prison sentence and a 4.800 EUR fine. Bofin Biscuits, who had joined the proceedings by suing its now ex-employee for civil injury, requested 1.500 EUR for the still missing laptop, 2.500 EUR for the time spent on recovering the information stored on the laptop, 500 EUR moral damages and a provisional damages amount of 25.000 EUR for having stolen the secret cookie recipes.
Today, the European Parliament approved a Directive that seeks to simplify and harmonize the law on trade secrets throughout the European Union with a vast majority (503 in favor, 131 against and 18 abstentions). The Directive was first proposed in 2013. Although the initial proposal was deliberately kept ‘low profile,’ it was the subject of heated debates up until today’s vote. Certain members of parliament indeed invoked the ‘Panama Papers’ and requested that the vote be suspended until the European Commission would have prepared its proposal specifically dealing with whistleblowers. The vote now goes to the EU Council. As this typically is but a formality, it is likely that the Council will approve the Directive as it reads today. If it does, EU member states will have roughly two years to replace their current patchwork of trade secret law and implement the Directive into national law.
The Directive’s stated intent is to “enhance the competitiveness of European businesses and research bodies” and to “improve the conditions/framework for the development and exploitation of innovation and for knowledge transfer” within the EU.
Continue Reading