Dear Editor,
I would like to bring to the notice of your readers an area that would benefit from some regulation and perhaps even legislation. I refer to the protection of trade secrets, which has not been analysed under any policy and which is the source of an existing yet unfounded problem.
As your readers will appreciate, trade secrets constitute certain confidential information of commercial value held by a business enterprise, which gives it a commercial advantage over competitors in the market. This is the intellectual property (IP) of an enterprise, which it holds and exploits. The unauthorized access or use of such information is considered an unfair trade practice. Yet, whether trade secrets are deserving of IP protection is questionable, and some may regard it as treading in murky waters.
This conundrum calls for an analysis from a philosophical and economic viewpoint. The philosophical justification of trade secrets as IP is derived from the celebrated “labour theory” of philosopher John Locke. Labour and effort put in by an individual to convert publicly accessible resources into an intellectual creation are rewarded by deeming and acknowledging such creation to be the property of such person, thus enabling the creator to obtain the returns of the financial investment in such labour. Thus philosophically, trade secrets deserve IP protection.
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