Leading Scholar and Practitioners Publish Opposing Views on the Defend Trade Secrets Act

Last week, while the Defend Trade Secrets Act works its way through Congress, James Pooley, a well-respected attorney and former Deputy Director General of WIPO released a draft of his forthcoming George Mason Law Review article, The Myth of the Trade Secret Troll: Why We Need a Federal Civil Claim for Trade Secret Misappropriation. During this same week 42 professors sent a letter to Congress opposing the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), expressing strong concern that the DTSA “will not solve the problems identified by its sponsors” and instead would “likely [] create new problems that could adversely impact domestic innovation, increase the duration and cost of trade secret litigation, and ultimately negatively affect economic growth.” Professor Michael Risch, who signed the professors’ letter has expressed on his Patent & IP Blog that while the new DTSA is much improved from the former version, he still maintains concerns about the current version’s inevitable disclosure and seizure rules. As of August 29, 2015, “both the House and the Senate had referred the DTSA to their respective Committees on the Judiciary with bipartisan support.”