The Choice of the Protection of Enterprise's Technologies – Centering on the Liabilities of Infringement of Patents and Trade Secrets
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Hsieh, Ya-Yun
Abstract
Accompanied with the era of knowledge and technology and the increasing competition among enterprises, the enterprises are all engaging in the development of new technologies in order to dominate the market. On the other hand, there are also many people who are not willing to invest such high costs to develop the technologies themselves but choosing to pirate others'' new technologies for their own profits, which causes other enterprises'' irreparable losses. Therefore, the author analyzed the protective methods for new technologies both from factual and legal perspectives and further evaluated the pros and cons between such methods based on the nature of various new technologies and the enterprises'' future plan of using such new technologies. From the perspective of legal protection, the intellectual property rights involving new technologies are patent and trade secret systems. Criminal penalty of all kinds of patent infringement was abolished from Patent Law of R.O.C. in 2003, while the legislators determined to add criminal liability to trade secret infringement in 2013 for the protection of the same, therefore, the remedies that may be sought for by the holder of trade secrets differ from which may be sought for by the patentees. The author hold that since patents and trade secrets are the most similar systems within intellectual property rights and the protective objects of these two systems overlap a lot, it is unreasonable that the protective policies of these two systems are different. In addition, when enterprises choose the method to protect their new technologies, they may, under our current regulations, prefer to choose the trade secret system with one more criminal remedy, however, according to the non-revealing nature of trade secrets, such system cannot grant the public the right to practice and use such invention, and thus forms an obstacle to the improvement of the whole industry, which is completely opposite to the legislative reason that the nation intends to grand the inventor the exclusive right through the patent system for the exchange of revealing his/her inventions for the improvement of industry. Therefore, not only shall the added criminal remedy of trade secrets be criticized for many reasons, but the legislators shall, for the patent system, seek a balance between the ""avoidance of lawsuit abuse"" and the ""provision of the patentee''s economic incentive"" other than merely abolishing all kinds of criminal penalty for patent infringement, which is also a considerable issue after the adding of criminal remedy for trade secrets.
Subjects
patent
trade secret
infringement
decriminalization
criminal liabilities
punitive damages
SDGs
Type
thesis