Acceptable means of obtaining information

[mehadihasan123456]

The United States Supreme Court has defined one policy that satisfies the requirements of trade secret law as "conformity to standards of commercial ethics."

However, even under this approach, the scope of what constitutes "permissible means" is so broad that the Model Statute does not define the term. Rather, the Act sets the parameters for what is impermissible by defining "impermissible means":

"Impermissible means" include theft, bribery, misrepresentation, breach viber data or inducement of breach of secrecy obligations, or espionage by electronic or other means.
Uniform Trade Secrets Act, 1(1).

Thus, if a list of downstream distributors can be obtained independently of the entire list of distributors and without the use of impermissible means, that list itself cannot constitute a trade secret. In this case, distributors with respect to a small network fragment can easily reproduce their downstream list from memory.

However, it is unlikely that a distributor with a large downstream network would be able to independently reproduce all of the information pertaining to it. Thus, if a poaching event involved a large downstream fragment, the company would be very skeptical of the claim that the information was obtained in a legitimate manner. This would result in a biased investigation into how the distributor obtained the information.