Access to undisclosed know-how

Joy Y. Xiang

Chapter 5 in The Exploitation of Intellectual Property Rights, 2023, pp 112-136 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Access to technology, or technology transfer, includes the access to and transfer of know-how. Conventionally, per the WTO TRIPS Agreement, know-how is considered undisclosed information protected by trade secret laws. Recipients of technology transfer seek to access such undisclosed know-how. For example, the 2020 Covid-19 IP waiver proposal made by India and South Africa at the WTO TRIPS Council asked for the waiver of relevant trade secret rights to ease access to technological know-how for combating the Covid-19 virus. In practice, how can a party successfully gain legal access to undisclosed know-how? Such know-how likely exists as a black box and is unreachable unless its owner is willing to share it. Such access is complicated when the information may exist outside the territory of the jurisdiction in which the seeker is located. This chapter explores possible answers to this question via venues in IP and competition laws and existing flexibilities in the international forum, such as the WTO TRIPS Agreement. The chapter suggests that we expand the know-how concept and adopt a packaged and collaborative approach to accessing undisclosed know-how.

Keywords: Law - Academic; Law - Professional (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781035311460/9781035311460.00010.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22293_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().