The Legal Protection Of The Trade Secrets

As a kind of intangible property of great economic values, trade secret will play an important role in current market competition more and more. Generally speaking, the pool of the technological power and the master of the information resources usually decide the future of an enterprise. However, such cases of the loss of the trade secret as employees who jump ship carry away with the information; the mainstays open up the enterprises of their own; the internal employees sell the information; the appropriation of the information by the rivalries and so on forth appear in great quantities. All of these have been the great obstacle for the enterprises especially the new technological enterprise to develop. Therefore, in order to follow the commercial morals and keep the normal order of the market competition, promote the technological innovation and encourage the invention and creation, mediate the social public interests, enforce the legal protection of the trade secret have been an actual problem which we should not negelect.Trade secret is a kind of information in technological or business. Such information keeps its secrecy through the way of information by its holders. However, people live in a society which full of various information and not all of them are protected by the law. Therefore, giving a resonable notion and its composition to the trade secret is of important meaning. According to our law, only those technological and commercial information which is not known by the public and can bring the economic interests for the proprietors, which has great usefulness and protected by the proprietors can be called the trade secrets. To see from the world, the scope of the protection of the secret has a trend of enlargement both in theory and in legislation. According to the analysis of the notion which has been mentioned before, the composition of the trade secret should include at least the following things: secrecy, values and usefulness. Secrecy is the presupposition of the trade secret toproper and reasonable measures. Values can make its holders to keep the competitive priority for marsting the trade secret. Usefulness need the definities of the trade secret, that is to say, we should determine its concrete content and make a clear distillation between the trade secret and the other things. Aside from all those things, the trade secret also require the relative novelty, that is to say, the related information should differ from the common sense in the lowest limitation.In our country, the proprietors of the trade secret refers to the natural persons, corporations or the other organizations. But the international treaties have a wide trend for defining the scope of the proprietors. It highlights in the TRIPs agreement not only the natural persons and corporations but also the "legal control" persons who have the right of litigation as well such as the people who keep and use the trade secret temporarily when receiving trust or permission.Trade secret is the intellectual creation of the proprietors as a kind of intangible property. Therefore, it belongs to the intellectual property. But trade secret is so special that it differs from the other types of the intellectual property, eg. the patent, the trademark right and the copyright. The protection of the trade secret originated in the protection of the credit right, but in the modern society ,the trend shows that the trade secret can be a kind of the indepensable intellectual property and it can get rid of the limitation of the relative right in the meaning of the credit right, so it can accept the co-protection of the credit right law and the tort law.The legal protection of the trade secret has an important role in the legal protection system of the intellectual property, it is one of the four basic pillars of the system. The protection forbids three types of behaviors, ie. the behavior of procurement, utilization and revelation of the trade secret by illeagal means without permission. The legal protection of the trade secret punish th...