15th June 2018
On 9th June 2018, the Trade Secrets Directive; new EU legislation, came into force.
The aim of this legislation is to set out a minimum standard to protect trade secrets. Until this point, trade secrets were not defined under UK law but merely protected under the common law of confidence – which realistically, isn’t that much! To be defined as a trade secret, information would have to meet the following three requirements:
- It has commercial value;
- It has been subject to reasonable steps to be kept secret;
- It is secret in the sense that it is not readily accessible to anyone, or generally known, within the realms that normally deal with the information in question.
Kevin Hanson of Taylor Vinters wrote an interesting article on this very subject, and this can be read here.