Defining Trade Secrets in the United States: Past and Present Challenges – A Way Forward?

When approaching an analysis of a particular area of law, one must initially locate and understand the definition of its core concept. Yet in trade secret law serious obstacles impede the process. Unlike other intellectual property (IP) regimes, such as copyright and patent law, the core concepts of which are subject to unitary definitions governed by international treaties or domestic statutes, the trade secret concept has received no parallel treatment and, until recently in the United States, remained mainly defined under common law. Subtle differences in the way trade secrets were judicially conceived often generated conflicts between courts, opening the door for the application of divergent rules on similar points. This confusing background prompted the individual U.S. jurisdictions to gradually orient towards implementing statutory provisions in defining trade secrets. Despite the fact that U.S. trade secret law has since seen several statutory interventions at state and federal level, the precise meaning and definitional parameters of the concept remain elusive. This paper probes the existing trade secret definitions applicable in the U.S. via analysis of the divergent sources of law that underscored their formulation from the past until the present and identifies the challenges pertinent to their application in practice. Its aim is to analyze and compare these legal sources: first, to determine whether the current definition for the concept of a trade secret is adequate, or whether perhaps the existence of the multi-tier system impedes a party’s ability to identify trade secrets in a cross-border context; and second, to investigate whether a unanimously accepted definition under a pre-emptive statute complementary to one under an elaborated internationally binding treaty might remedy this issue.