Webinar: Tanya Aplin, King’s CollegeLondon

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 20th of October 2020 at 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Tanya Aplin, Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. The title of the talk is "The limits of EU trade secret protection".

The moderator will be Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. To join us follow this link: https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/3011249

This webinar is free and open to all. To participate and for further information, please contact Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos at least a day prior to the seminar.

Abstract: Trade secrets protection has been harmonised in the EU by the Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943. During the journey of the Directive, controversies and debate surrounded the scope of trade secrets protection and its appropriate limits. There were concerns that public institutions, journalists, employees, whistleblowers, competitors and consumers would be unduly restricted. As such, what evolved as article 3 ‘Lawful acquisition, use or disclosure’ and article 5 ‘Exceptions’ attracted a great deal of attention, especially at the European Parliament stage. This paper examines the background and scope of articles 3 and 5 of the Directive (which include limits for independent creation, reverse engineering, public interest and freedom of expression). Based on this analysis, it is argued that there is considerable risk of divergence in implementation by Member States and interpretation by national courts and the interpretative approach that the CJEU should adopt towards these provisions is unclear.