Devender Chauhan (Article Assistant) 23 April 2014

Trade secrets voilation - us

Hi All,

My brother is working as a freelancer of online and email marketing. He worked for a US entity for around 4 years. He didn't sign any agreement nor accepted any terms and conditions for handing the US entity data. Now the customer list of that US entity is leaked by someone to his competitor.

Now the US entity is claiming that the list is leaked from India and as only my brother had the access of that list, so he filed court case against my brother in US court.

Now my question is whether my brother is liable to attend this case by himself or through representative or he can ask the US entity to file the case in India as he didn't have any such type of agreement with the US entity for arbitration and for the data he handled during the freelance period.

Thanks in advance

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1 Replies

Kumar Doab (FIN) 23 April 2014

If he has not signed agreement to that effect he may succeed.

He may vehemently deny and claim that he is not signatory to any such agreement, and he has not disclosed.

The company has agreed that data has leaked from India.

Consult a lawyer handling such cases in advance.

You may find the following as relevant;

The Virginia Uniform Trade Secrets Act:

A Critical Summary of the Act and Case Law [1]

In many cases a written contract will not be in place between the trade secret owner and the misappropriator of the trade secret. A frequent example involves a departing employee who misappropriates a trade secret from his employer and the employee has not executed a non-disclosure of proprietary information agreement. Recognizing the obvious inadequacies of the use of the property theory and the contract theory to justify the protection of trade secrets, law professors and jurists advanced the theory that the protection of trade secrets is justified on the basis of a general duty of good faith. That is, it is fair to protect someone who has a trade secret from someone who misappropriates it by improper or unlawful means. Finally, it has been argued that trade secret protection is justified, like patents, to encourage inventors and investors to create, innovate and develop new technologies by protecting their inventions and investments and allowing them to profit thereby.

https://www.vjolt.net/vol5/issue3/v5i3a15-Babirak.html