On Protection Of Commercial Secrets And Prohibition Of Business Strife Laws

Today, the value of the business secrets becomes more and more important with the globalization of science and technology, and economic integration. It becomes a common issue how to protect the business secrets. The activities of infringing upon the protection of business secrets are changing with each passing day due to the protection of business secrets itself being so complicated, covert and indistinct. It becomes a major and key issue to most of the countries to enhance and perfect the legal prohibition of business strife. In the field of employing relationship, infringements of business secrets happen quite often. Many countries set up and make perfection of the system of prohibition of business strife through legislation with the aim of protecting the business secrets. In this article, the prohibition of business strife is in narrow sense. It refers to certain specified persons working in a corporation (shareholders, partners, board members, senior management personnel, employees, etc.) who shall not compete with the corporation they are working for or within a certain period of time after leaving the corporation, including prohibition of having a part-time job or holding a post in a rival firm and dealing with the same business of the corporation they are working or worked for. In view of the legislation of the other countries, the legal prohibition of business strife or the agreed prohibition of business strife is to balance and co-ordinate the interests between the corporation (employer, or firms) and workers ( employee or laborer ), and maintain the sequence of the competition market. In general, the legal prohibition of business strife imposes duties of prohibition of business strife to the employees, while the agreed prohibition of business strife mainly imposes duties of prohibition of business strife to a specified person after his leaving the post. It's necessary to check and examine the agreement whether it's reasonable and legal or not. Only through checking and examining the protective body, main causes of obligations, limitation of domain, limitation of areas, limitation of time period, economic compensation, liability of breach of the agreement in the agreed prohibition of business strife can we say whether it has the force of law or not. Comparing with laws of other countries, our law is being perfected in view of prohibition of business strife, and plays an important role in daily life. Particularly, the publication of《Labor contract Law》is a milestone in China. But generally speaking, all these stipulations are too general, not so operative, or some norms not reasonable, the system itself is to be improved, or the level of law is too low, applicable scope is not so wide, so a further approach and more improvement should be made. As for the legal prohibition of business strife, it should uniformly set up stipulations of main scope of obligations; complement and detail the applicable terms of prohibition of business strife; reasonably enrich and perfect the legal stipulations of civil liabilities. As for the agreed prohibition of business strife, it should further improve the general judge standards of effectiveness; impose proper and fundamental stipulations on the standards of scope, areas, time period, economic compensations and penalty; supplement the stipulations of scope in which the employees should undertake the prohibition of business strife duty after leaving the post, set up clear stipulations under which the prohibition of business strife will become invalid.