| Abstract [eng] |
Trade secrets are becoming more popular in nowadays business world because of the innovations, the movement of the workers and the globalisation of business relations. Frequently, it is the worth or even the worthiest part of the property of the undertaking. However, the protection of trade secrets is lower than protection of intellectual property assets. It can be concluded through the absence of exceptional rights to the assets, the secret nature and less possibilities of the enforcement. First analised issue in this master thesis is the concept of secrets and the criteria applied to introduce the information as a trade secret. In order to identify that information is deemed to be a trade secret, it shall be found that: 1. information is secret; 2. it has a commercial value and 3. the owner takes reasonable efforts to protect this asset. Although, different laws and practices establish the protection of trade secrets among different countries, there is a trend that these criteria are uniform. The sources to analyse the concept of trade secrets mostly are the decisions of the courts, the doctrine and the interpretation of international treaties. The second issue is the relation between trade secrets and intellectual property assets. To go deeper to this issue there will be analised different opinions towards trade secrets and the essential features distinguishing trade secrets from intellectual property assets. The third issue arises because of the inaccurate and unclear definition between trade secrets and the competition law, especially the theory of essential facilities. In this master thesis it is analysed the decision of ECJ in Microsoft case. There is focussed on the application of essential facilities theory on trade secrets. |
