At the round of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations that wrapped up last week in Malaysia, a longstanding U.S. proposal to require TPP members to punish trade secret theft with criminal sanctions faced growing opposition, to the point that U.S. business lobbyists are now mounting a coordinated effort to fight for strong and uniform criminal penalties as demanded by the U.S. government. The United States has already made a TPP proposal on trade secrets that would require countries to have criminal penalties in place to punish the willful misappropriation of proprietary information. The business push on trade secrets, which involves the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is being launched now because there is increasing reluctance among many TPP countries to adopt or strengthen criminal provisions for trade secret theft. This is due to the fact that increasing criminal penalties through trade agreements is often a domestically sensitive issue, according to a business source.
展开▼
