Trade Secret Protection Act | A Provisional Injunction Application for Violation of the Trade Secret Protection Act, with All Claims Dismissed

The 🔗Trade Secret Protection Act is the abbreviated name of the Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act, and its purpose is to maintain sound order in transactions through the protection of corporate trade secrets.

A 🔗trade secret means technical or managerial information useful for business activities, such as production methods and sales methods, that is not publicly known, holds independent value, and is managed as confidential.

The requirements for establishment are as follows.

Representative types of information that may be protected as trade secrets are as follows.

A violation of the Trade Secret Protection Act may be punishable by imprisonment of up to 10 years or a fine of up to 500 million won.

If an amount equal to 10 times the property gain resulting from the violation exceeds 500 million won, a fine of not less than twice and not more than 10 times that property gain is imposed.

The creditor claims that the client downloaded documents constituting trade secrets, such as technical materials, internal planning documents, and customer-related data.

To prove this, the creditor submitted a related attached list as evidence, but this was a list unrelated to the matter.

This is because the attached list concerns only the 'file name, date modified, number of accounts, type, and path,' and contains no content whatsoever regarding 'the person who downloaded, the date and time of the download, and the download path.'

The attorney in charge emphasized that the attached list submitted by the creditor had no relation whatsoever to the matter, and that the creditor had failed entirely to substantiate which files constituted trade secrets and for what reason.

According to the Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act, a trade secret refers to information on a production method, a sales method, or other technical or managerial information useful for business activities that is not publicly known, that has independent economic value, and that has been kept secret.

In practice, the following factors are considered in order to determine whether information has secret management status.

The crux of this case was to closely examine the substantive requirements for the establishment of a 'trade secret' and then prove that the client's conduct fell within the ordinary scope of business.

Disputes relating to trade secrets are highly sensitive, and an application for a provisional injunction in particular, unlike an ordinary lawsuit, requires a rapid response and precise legal argument, so expertise in the Trade Secret Protection Act is required.

At Daeryun LLC, specialized attorneys who have handled numerous trade secret cases provide a tailored response strategy, focusing on matters such as ▲whether the information constitutes a trade secret, ▲the assessment of whether the conduct constitutes infringement, and ▲whether there is a need for preservation.

If you are involved in a trade secret lawsuit such as the above, please seek out Daeryun LLC, which has handled numerous related cases and provides defense strategies dedicated solely to the client through a task force response.