CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION - DEFINITION AND LEGAL CHARACTER OF PROTECTION

Abstract

The term “business secret” is one of many terms used in the language of law and the language of lawyers with reference to the information kept secret, concerning such a method of operation used in the activity of an enterprise which brings market success or at least gives hope for success. Despite the expansion of the industrial property rights, that has been observed for decades, the importance of confidential information, referred to, among others as business secrets or trade secrets, is still growing and is accompanied by the development of the rules for their legal protection. Nowadays, many entrepreneurs treat confidentiality of information as a no less important factor, and often even more convenient for acquiring and maintaining market position than industrial property rights. An illustration and confirmation of the growing role of legal protection of confidential information may be, observed in recent years, the development of national legal regulations concerning this matter, while at the EU level the adoption in 2016 of the Directive 2016/943 on protection of secret know–how and confidential commercial information (an enterprise’s secret) against their unlawful acquisition, use and disclosure. The legal protection of trade secret is the subject of numerous discussions on various aspects of this issue. The paper is dedicated only to one of them – identification of information considered to be an enterprise’s protected secret and a model of this protection. In particular, the focus was on analyzing the compliance in this scope with the Polish law for the protection of business secret pursuant to the Act on Combating Unfair Competition with the Directive 2016/943.