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COURT BARS ACCESS TO CASE FILES TO PROTECT TECHNICAL SECRETS
In a ruling dated 31 December 2004, the Taiwan High Court held that technical information pro-vided by a respondent in injunction proceedings was a trade secret, and that it was lawful to pre-vent the original petitioner from reading the in-formation.
In the case concerned, the petitioner had peti-tioned the court to issue an injunction against the respondent, prohibiting the respondent from manufacturing and selling the product at issue. After the court granted the injunction, the re-spondent petitioned the court to lift the injunc-tion on the respondent's provision of a bond. The respondent appended to its petition a patent in-fringement assessment report, as evidence that it had not infringed the petitioner's invention patent. The respondent asserted that the assessment re-port revealed its technical secrets related to the allegedly infringing product, and petitioned the court to bar the original petitioner from reading, copying, or photographing this technical infor-mation, on the grounds that the technology concerned was the respondent's trade secret, protected under the Trade Secrets Act.
The court held that the granting of an injunction was a preventive measure, and the court hearing the petition for an injunction need not consider substantive issues such as whether the product concerned did indeed infringe the patent. These were matters to be dealt with by the court that would hear the litigation in the underlying case. The district court had not considered the as-sessment report when deciding whether to lift the injunction, and the injunction proceedings were not the litigation in the underlying case. There-fore to forbid the original petitioner to read, copy, or photograph the documents would not hinder the petitioner in arguing the case.
Article 242 Paragraph 3 of the Code of Civil Procedure provides that if documents included in case files impinge on the privacy or trade secrets of a party to the case, or of a third party, and if allowing such documents to be read, copied, or photographed would be likely to cause substan-tial harm to the party concerned, then the court may, on petition or acting ex officio, rule to for-bid or restrict such access. Further, under Article 14 Paragraph 2 of the Trade Secrets Act, if a means of attack or defense adduced by a party to a case involves trade secrets, then at the request of the party concerned the court may close the proceedings to the public, or restrict access to the case files. Hence the Taiwan High Court held that the assessment report submitted by the re-spondent, which described technology related to the disputed product, was indeed a trade secret of the respondent, and upheld the original ruling of the district court.