Discovering a Trade Secret

June 24, 2009
Intellectual Property News and Interesting Facts

Companies often try to discover one another’s trade secrets through lawful methods of reverse engineering on one hand, and potentially unlawful methods including industrial espionage on the other.

Acts of industrial espionage are generally illegal in their own right under the relevant governing laws. The importance of that illegality to trade secret law is as follows: if a trade secret is acquired by improper means (a somewhat wider concept than “illegal means” but inclusive of such means), the secret is generally deemed to have been misappropriated.

Thus if a trade secret has been acquired via industrial espionage, its acquirer will probably be subject to legal liability for acquiring it improperly.