The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) (, codified at , et seq.) is a United States federal law that allows an owner of a trade secret to sue in federal court when its

trade secrets Trade secrets are a type of intellectual property that includes formulas, practices, processes, designs, instruments, patterns, or compilations of information that have inherent economic value because they are not generally known or readily a ...

have been misappropriated. The act was signed into law by President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

on May 11, 2016. It underscored Congress’s desire to align closely with the

Uniform Trade Secrets Act The Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), published by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) in 1979 and amended in 1985, is a Uniform Act promulgated for adoption by states in the United States. One goal of the UTSA is to make the state laws governing tra ...

, which had been adopted in some form in almost every U.S. state. Technically, the DTSA extended the

Economic Espionage Act of 1996 The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 () was a 6 title Act of Congress dealing with a wide range of issues, including not only industrial espionage (''e.g.'', the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret and the National Information Infrastructu ...

, which criminalizes certain trade secret misappropriations. The law also grants

legal immunity Legal immunity, or immunity from prosecution, is a legal status wherein an individual or entity cannot be held liable for a violation of the law, in order to facilitate societal aims that outweigh the value of imposing liability in such cases. Su ...

to corporate

whistleblower A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whi ...

s. After the DTSA's passage by the Senate, ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

'' magazine called the law the "Biggest Development in /nowiki>Intellectual_Property.html" ;"title="Intellectual_Property.html" ;"title="/nowiki>Intellectual Property">/nowiki>Intellectual Property">Intellectual_Property.html" ;"title="/nowiki>Intellectual Property">/nowiki>Intellectual Property/nowiki> in Years".

Notable cases

The first judicial decision under the DTSA was ''Henry Schein, Inc. v. Cook'', in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, on June 10, 2016. In that decision, U.S. District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar granted the first temporary restraining order under the DTSA prohibiting an ex-employee from soliciting customers of the plaintiff. The first verdict under the act came in ''Dalmatia Import Group, Inc. v. FoodMatch Inc. et al.'', on February 25, 2017. In that case, a federal jury awarded Dalmatia $2.5 million for misappropriation of trade secrets, trademark infringement and counterfeiting, $500,000 of which was allocated to the DTSA claim. The trade secrets claim was based on Foodmatch's misappropriation of Dalmatia's

fig jam The fig is the edible fruit of ''Ficus carica'', a species of small tree in the flowering plant family Moraceae. Native to the Mediterranean and western Asia, it has been cultivated since ancient times and is now widely grown throughout the worl ...

recipe.

References

External links

* {{USBill, 114, S., 1890 at congress.gov Acts of the 114th United States Congress Trade secrets United States federal commerce legislation United States federal trade legislation United States federal intellectual property legislation