McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP partner Dr. Emily Miao authored an article entitled, “The TianRui Group Company Ltd. v. U.S. International Trade Commission: A Powerful New Weapon for Combating Trade Secret Misappropriation Abroad” that appears in the January 11, 2013 online edition of Intellectual Property Today. What if trade secret misappropriation occurs abroad and the misappropriated trade secret is used to manufacture products that are then imported into the United States to compete with the trade secret owner’s products? Under the TianRui decision, a U.S. company doing business abroad may have recourse in the International Trade Commission (“ITC”) under section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (“section 337”) to exclude the importation of products that embody a misappropriated trade secret, even when the trade secret theft occurred entirely outside of the United States and the U.S. company is not using its trade secret in its products.
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Note: this article originally appeared in the MBHB Fall 2012 edition of snippets publication.