On The Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine In American Trade Secret Law And The Enlightenment

Inevitable disclosure doctrine is developed from the courts of U.S.A. who use the doctrine as an equitable tool to grant injunctions on competition in the absence of actual misappropriation. Firstly, this paper uses the historical analysis to solve the problem of which case was the first to apply inevitable disclosure an make clear that the case of Eastman Kodak Co. v. Powers Film Prod., Inc.(1919) was the very first to introduce the doctrine. After the cases of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. American Potash & Chemical Corp. (1964) and PepsiCo Inc. v. Redmond (1995), inevitable disclosure doctrine was developed and applied widely. But in the process of expansion, this doctrine brought some passive effect. The courts of U.S.A began to take some restrains on the application of it to balance the public interest of employees'mobility. This paper specifies the trend of less application of the inevitable disclosure doctrine. But on the other hand, because of the irreplaceable virtues of this doctrine, courts of U.S.A cannot avoid to apply it. Secondly, this paper uses the normative analysis to point out that in the application of inevitable disclosure, actually there are no consistent standards. There are normative general elements and non-normative general elements. It is a course of balance between the employers and employees when the courts choose the elements in the application of inevitable disclosure.At last, this paper analyses the status of our protection for trade secrets. At present, we use the model of non-compete agreements to protect the former employer's trade secrets after the employees leave to work for the competitor. But on one side, it is easily to violate the interests of employees; on the other side, non-compete could not provide relief to threaten infringement of trade secret. In the legal system of China, there is no direct basis of protection for threaten infringement of trade secret. Although, in our legal system, there are articles that acknowledge the relief for threaten trade secret infringement. Based on this, we can draw on the experience of injunction relief in the UTSA of USA to complete the protection of trade secret in Anti-unfair Competition Law or to provide relief for threaten infringement of trade secret in Law of Trade Secrets.