In early December, the Senate Judiciary Committee had placed on its agenda a markup of the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015, S. 1890, 114th Cong. (1st Sess. 2015). This bill, along with its House counterpart, H.R. 3326, provides the first federal civil cause of action for trade secret misappropriation. To date, only very limited circumstances allow private plaintiffs to bring an action based on federal trade secrecy law, with most cases relying various states' versions of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) (amended 1985), 14 U.L.A. 369 (Supp. 1989), instead. The original December 3 meeting got postponed to December 10. The markup never happened on December 10 either, however, because the Judiciary Committee decided based on the recent tragedies in Paris and San Bernardino to concentrate that day on two anti-terrorism bills instead. As is often the case, intellectual property legislation advances only when more urgent issues leave room for its consideration.
Senator Grassley, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, does not appear to have become any less interested in this topic in recent weeks. In a December 2 hearing, his remarks continued to recognize calls from "a broad coalition of stakeholders... about the need for a federal law to protect their valuable trade secrets." Thus, there is no reason to believe that this legislation will stall. More likely, it will be taken up for committee markup in January, and is widely expected to progress to a full vote of the Senate thereafter.
The legislation making its way through the House and the Senate provides not only the ability for a trade secret owner to bring a federal civil action for trade secret misappropriation, but also the ability to obtain an ex parte civil seizure order in certain circumstances "to prevent the propagation or dissemination of the trade secret." The legislation is not intended to replace, but rather to complement the existing federal Economic Espionage Act of 1996, Pub.L. 104–294, 110 Stat. 3488 (1996), the UTSA, and other state and federal laws usable to combat trade secret misappropriation.
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