Legal protection of Trade Secrets: A Comparative analysis among European and African countries

Abstract

In the globalization era, Intellectual property rights increased their value, became more important, be through patents, copyrights, trademarks or trade secrets. Trade secrets play an important role to the enterprises, presenting lower costs in comparison with patents, an unlimited period of protection, immediate effect and other advantages. This thesis presents an analysis of trade secrets as a whole and their legal protection among different jurisdictions in the European Union and Africa. A comparison between trade secrets patents and copyrights is also discussed. The EU directive that harmonized the trade secrets protection in Europe is a big advantage in comparison with the African countries trade secrets legislation, and it is presented in this work as well. This thesis analyses the economic importance of trade secrets, exposes the problems of trade secrets misappropriation, the tools available to keep the information as secret and the limitations of trade secrets and finally shows the trade secrets regulations in different countries.