Comparative Study on Competent Forum for Civil Disputes of Trade Secrets Infringements in Digital Environment

Trade secrets, as confidential information and containing commercial importance, cause the privilege of a merchant to the other competitors. However, because of the special nature of trade secrets, this protection is not powerful and efficient. In addition, the development of internet environment has increased the challenges of this protection because it has provided the possibility of right infringement by millions of users in electronic environment; furthermore, there is not efficient legal control in this environment. The further challenge of this issue is that the trade secret owner do not sometimes know competent forum for taking an action against infringer. In spite of trademark and patent, there is no regional uniform provision for jurisdiction on trade secret disputes at regional or international levels. Therefore, this article constitutes the survey of these challenges and the analytic-comparative study on certain international conventions and some legal systems such as Iranian Law.