Research On The Trade Secret Protection In The European Union

The European Union has a long history of trade secrets protection. However, as there was no uniform EU framework for the protection of trade secret, companies from different member states were faced with substantial differences in national laws and unwanted gaps. The EU antitrust enforcers, lacking such uniform standards, had been using competition law to shape substantive trade secret laws. On 28 November 2013, the European Commission announced a proposal for a directive on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information, establishing common definitions, procedures and sanction regard to trade secrets. It is the first directive in EU level to protect trade secrets, which reflects that the EU attaches much greater importance to the protection of trade secrets than before. With this Directive, EU transfers the approach to protect trade secrets from competition law in center to trade secrets law in center, with a necessary goal in mind: a harmonization of the national laws of the member countries.Inspired by the EU directive on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information, this paper examines the process of trade secrets protection in EU, and puts forward views to improve the legal system. In the first part of this article, I will overview trade secrets by givng the definition of trade secrets from the aspects of historic origin and practical implication and sketching the protection ways of EU member states. In the second part of this article, I will describe the traditional pattern of trade secret protection at EU level, which was mainly achieved by competition law and experienced the stages of opposition from protection, under specific conditions to protect, certainly protection, legislation to strengthen the protection and then ambiguous protection by EU. The third part of this paper will tell the legality and necessity of the issued Directive, from which we can get the trend that the protection of trade secrets in EU is from competition law in center to trade secrets law in center. In the fourth part of the article, Considering the EU trade secret protection evolution, experiences of other countries and the actual situation in our country, I propose China should legislate specialized trade secret protection law as soon as possible. Then I will put forward some suggestions to promote the development of trade secret protection system in China, including establishing temporary relief before litigation and confidential system in litigation, refining trade secrets compensation standards and admitting the legitimacy of independent development and the reverse engineering.