Judicial Determination Of The Scope Of Legal Protection Of "Customer List" From The Perspective Of Trade Secrets ——Take The Dispute Between Li And Huang Over Infringement Of Trade Secrets Of Huixu Company As An Example

Under the background of vigorous global economic development and increasingly fierce competition,the importance of trade secrets to enterprises is becoming more and more obvious.China has included trade secrets into the protection scope of the anti unfair competition law.At the same time,it is clear that the list of qualified customers can constitute trade secrets in the interpretation of the Supreme Court on legal issues of unfair competition.Because of its commercial value and trading advantages for operators,the customer list is pursued by operators.Therefore,violations of the obligee’s customer list often occur in judicial practice.Therefore,the importance of the protection of the customer list is also self-evident.However,China’s anti unfair competition law now focuses only on some common acts and subjects of infringing trade secrets.Combined with the relevant judicial interpretation of the Supreme Court,it only makes general provisions on the three elements required for the customer list to constitute trade secrets.However,the form of the customer list itself is ever-changing,and it seems to be "easy to obtain" The characteristics of "less valuable" and different from general trade secrets lead to the inability to solve such disputes by virtue of the existing legal provisions.Therefore,"the identification of the trade secrets constituted by the customer list" has become one of the key and difficult points in the trial practice of this kind of cases.Based on this,this paper will take the case of "dispute between Li and Huang over infringement of trade secrets of Huixu company" as the starting point,and on the basis of relevant theoretical views and a large number of trial practices,Study the three constituent elements of "not known to the public,having commercial value and taking reasonable confidentiality measures" that constitute trade secrets of the customer list,as well as the hot issue in the field of "identification of the company’s trade secrets and employees’ own knowledge and technology",so as to better deal with such disputes in practice in the future.This paper is generally divided into four parts.The first part is the introduction,which mainly includes the purpose and significance of studying the constituent elements of customer list,literature review,research methods used,as well as the difficulties and innovations of this paper.The second part mainly introduces the dispute cases of Li and Huang infringing Huixu’s trade secrets,extracts the focus of the dispute,and analyzes the connotation and shortcomings of their relevant judgments.The third part is the evaluation and analysis of this case.Firstly,it discusses whether the list of customers in this case meets the three requirements respectively.Secondly,combined with the specific situation of this case,it expounds how to define the company’s trade secrets and employees’ own knowledge.The fourth part is the thoughts and suggestions on the legal identification of the customer list: firstly,on the basis of collecting a large number of case judgments,summarize and sort out the specific manifestations of the identification of the three constituent elements of the customer list constituting the trade secret in China’s judicial practice,and secondly think about the difficulties existing in the identification of the legal nature of the customer list constituting the trade secret in China,Finally,combined with the above analysis,this paper puts forward the realization path of the standardization of judicial identification of customer list,and gives the corresponding feasible suggestions in judicial practice.