Assigning moral rights to holders of business secrets: the point of differentiation of trade secrets with the system of intellectual property

Abstract In accordance with the opinion of lawyers, the trade secrets are of the intellectual properties. In the intellectual property system, in order to protect creativity and intellectual works, two types of economic and moral rights are devoted to the creators and owners of them. moral rights is typically non-monetary concessions that are created to support the personality of the creators and, unlike economic rights, are not limited to time and place. In industrial properties, unlike literary and artistic works, the importance of moral rights has diminished in terms of focusing on commercial interests. This has intensified due to the unique nature of trade secrets, since the creativity, originality and even the novelty of the intellectual works are not important, and it is enough to take the reasonable safeguards to keep them confidential. Therefore, in written sources, there is no trace of the moral rights of the owners of trade secrets. Our findings suggest that the concept of "privacy" could be the basis for the formation of moral rights for the owners of trade secrets. Accordingly, "maintaining the confidentiality of information" and "disclosing secrets in the form of invention, compilation, and ..." are two rights that can be justified by the mentioned concept. since the source of the emergence of such rights (i.e. the occurrence of information in the owner's privacy) is not their perfect cause and since the said rights are not the main cause of the creation of an object and are not specifically reserved for the person who holds the secrets, it is better to consider the rights in question as voluntaraly and coercively transferable and abandonable.