The standardisation of trade secret protection was one of the goals of the TRIPs Agreement of 1998. Nevertheless, substantial differences in this protection remain across jurisdictions. When defining the optimal scope of trade secrets law, lawmakers should be aware that strong trade secret...

How do international organizations help states cooperate? Scholars have long argued that these organizations solve information problems by increasing transparency; however, we introduce a distinct information problem -- the disclosure dilemma -- that they can address using secrecy instead....

To obtain trade secret protection, a firm must take reasonable secrecy precautions (RSP) to guard the confidentiality of claimed information. The RSP requirement has long puzzled courts and scholars. In other areas of property and intellectual property law, such self-help is not a prerequisite...

Under New Zealand civil law there is no specific legislation that governs the protection of “trade secrets”. Before the civil courts the protection of secret information is largely addressed by the judge-made breach of confidence action. Yet, the term trade secrets are regularly used in...

The skills and innovations of indigenous and local communities - their so-called “traditional knowledge” - go largely unrecognized by intellectual property law. Meanwhile, patent and copyright laws reward the innovative and creative contributions of individuals and firms that freely use...

In the spring of 2010, the Hamline Law Review hosted a symposium to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the adoption of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. This article was written for the symposium and provides an exhaustive and detailed account of the historical context and drafting history of the...

With the liberalization of the Indian economy, it is increasingly believed that adequate protection of intellectual property is a necessary element in encouraging foreign investment. With a weak patent law, the protection of trade secrets assumes great importance. The development of the law...

This note seeks to understand the tension between trade secrecy law and patent law pointed out by Judge Hand. Further, this Note argues that the recently enacted America Invents Act (“AIA”) overrules the holding from Metallizing Engineering that secret prior commercial use by an inventor...

This book chapter surveys a variety of methods in conducting empirical trade secret research. It discusses data sources, study types and methods, and challenges unique to trade secrecy with respect to four different considerations: innovation incentives, tradeoffs with other IP, the "cost...