By Santiago Soler Lerma:

The willingness to protect valuable information of businesses is increasingly important. However, most businesses do not count on internal protocols nor a policy for safeguarding assets.

The 14th of January, we have conducted an internal training course regarding Trade Secrets. Directive 2016/943 highlights that companies invest to obtain, develop and apply technical solutions to gain a competitive advantage, and use different means to protect the outcome with intellectual property, patents, draws and designs and copyright. Another way of securing the outcomes of innovation consists on protecting the most valuable knowledge of the company that is not widely known and exploit it. These technical knowledge and valuable business information are known as trade secrets.

The regulation about trade secrets has not been passed in Spain yet but the concepts and criteria that should be considered are stablished by the above-mentioned Directive. In fact, the draft Act of Trade Secrets  (Boletín De las Cortes de 1 de junio de 2018) adopts the definitions and requirements of this type of information.

Delimitation of what can be considered to be a Trade Secret as compared to know-how, confidential information or patent right is essential to properly manage the information of a business.