Supreme Court Ruling: Trade Secrets Must Be Reviewed Holistically And Cannot Be Invalidated By Piecemeal Disassembly

The Supreme People's Court recently concluded a dispute over trade secret dispute. In its ruling, the Court established that: If a right holder, through repeated experiments, modifications, optimizations, and adjustments, has developed a complete technical solution that can be used in actual production and achieves good technical results, that solution cannot be deemed publicly known simply because individual pieces of information are disclosed separately in different pieces of prior art. In other words, courts must look at the whole technical solution, not just its isolated parts, when determining whether it qualifies as a trade secret.

This case involves a dispute over trade secrets. Company A filed a lawsuit with the first instance court, claiming that it was the rightful owner of certain trade secrets related to a production process and product preparation method for a product called PR3. Individual X, after leaving Company A, became a major shareholder and the legal