The emergence of a global standard for reasonable efforts?

During the last decade, the United States, the European Union, and Japan have taken major steps in harmonising trade secret protection. This harmonisation includes the arrival of apparently very similar definitions for what information can constitute a trade secret. One of the inherent requirements for trade secret protection is secrecy of the information in question, and policymakers, courts, and commentators have struggled with the question of how much effort an information owner must engage in to ensure such secrecy. This chapter looks into the evolution of the reasonable-efforts requirement in the United States, the reception of a seemingly equivalent standard in Japan throughout the last decades, and the recent implementation in the European Union and Germany.