US update: legal status of safeguarding proprietary information
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文摘
More than 50 years ago, Winston Churchill predicted that the “empires of the future” would be empires of the mind. As trade barriers continue to fall, today's business empires operate in a global marketplace in which multinational entities are continuing to merge and form new alliances. Knowledge is the key to growth in these new empires. Proprietary information is developed not only in the research and development laboratory or in the manufacturing plant, but on the loading dock, the retail floor, and in the corporate office as well. Even when a company's product is not information, the flow of knowledge becomes a lubricant of the corporate machine, and the reason these empires have grown and will continue to do so. That knowledge which is critical to a company, the proprietary information which makes a company unique and gives it the edge on its competition, is the subject of much scrutiny, and the desire to safeguard it from misappropriation has been fueled by the fact that technology has made proprietary information more accessible and harder to protect. This article examines how US legislation and case law treat “proprietary” information and what the problems are in the context of a constantly evolving technology.