INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF TRADE SECRET LAW
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https://doi.org/10.55662/Abstract
The protection of trade secrets is a well-established concept, functionally related to the impact of innovation in the evolution of the economy. Starting from the 19th century, the industrial revolution urged law makers to shape the notion of trade secrets as a specific asset deserving legal protection. Over the decades and until the emergence of the new economy, the different sensitivity of legislators determined a heterogeneous and patchy evolutionary path mirroring the local economic context. Not surprisingly, the rise of the global information society has given a new boost to the role of trade secrets and has generated the demand for a uniform standard of protection across national boundaries. The critical question for trade secret law always has been and continues to be: Why give legal protection to secret information? As will be discussed later, this question had a relatively clear answer in the late nineteenth century, but the answer lost its power to persuade with the ascendancy of legal realism in the 1920s and 1930s. We have yet to find a satisfactory substitute.
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