Transposing the Trade Secrets Directive into English Law: Confidentiality Agreements
Chartreuse Author Jarv Licence Free Art Licence Source Wikimedia Commons Jane Lambert Patents subsist for 20 years, copyrights for the life of the author plus 70 years but the obligation neither to disclose nor make use of business or technical information that is disclosed in confidence can last indefinitely. The recipe for Chartreuse is a case in point. That distinctive liqueur has been emulated and occasionally counterfeited but never replicated. All members of the World Trade Organization are obliged to protect undisclosed information from unauthorized use and disclosure by art 39 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ("TRIPS") but different countries including different EU member states discharge that obligation in different ways. Such differences affect the functioning of the internal market. To minimize those differences the European Council adopted the trade secrets directive (Dir...