THE TRADE SECRETS DIRECTIVE MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY – ALSO IN DENMARK
1 year in prison.
It had major consequences for an employee to obtain information about the company’s trade secrets and to copy this information to their own email.
The circumstances were that shortly before a self-chosen resignation, it turned out that an employee had transferred almost 39 emails from the company to their own Hotmail account. A few days before, the employee had been interviewed by a competitor and had accepted the job.
As the case began to unfold, it coincided with the Danish Parliament adopting and implementing an EU directive following a bill to “harmonise the legislation on trade secrets so that the rules are the same throughout the EU…”
In January 2018, the Trade Secrets Directive was adopted as a new independent law and replaced the Marketing Practices Act. The directive was adopted in the EU back in May 2016. In several respects, the rules are similar.
The Trade Secrets Directive protects and creates a level playing field for businesses in the EU regarding know-how, market and business strategies, and inventions. The prosecution thus argued, with reference to the Trade Secrets Act, that illegal transfers had clearly taken place under particularly aggravating circumstances.
The case ran throughout the entire corona period and thus dragged on. Both the District Court and the High Court, therefore, found that due to the long processing time and the fact that no evidence had been found that the trade secrets had been passed on and thus had caused damage to the company, the sentence should be conditional with a condition of community service.
The Central and West Jutland Police published the outcome in the District Court on its own website:
Woman convicted of theft of trade secrets
A 47-year-old woman from Silkeborg was today sentenced to 1 year’s suspended imprisonment for stealing trade secrets from her employer.
Before a woman from Silkeborg changed jobs from one company to another, she sent 39 e-mails from her work e-mail to her private e-mail with attached documents and files from the company she left. These included information on product development processes, strategy, cost prices, sales prices and names of suppliers.
Today, Tuesday, April 11, 2023, the 47-year-old woman was found guilty of hacking and illegal acquisition of trade secrets under particularly aggravating circumstances. The verdict was handed down by the Court in Viborg, and the sentence was one year’s imprisonment, which was suspended with a condition of 200 hours of community service.
Sønderby Legal assisted the company from start to finish.
