It is reported that Japanese companies’ internal documents marked “CONFIDENTIAL” are posted on Baidu document-sharing site. 186 companies’ confidential documents which includes a product diagram have been reportedly posted on this site between June 2017 and February 2018.

Japanese companies today carefully review and select their technologies to be filed patent applications, considering cost and risk of unnecessary technology disclosure, and therefore reduce patent application filing. At the same time, they are attracted to trade secret protection and its related services such as  timestamp service which is used to prove existence of a particular electrical data at a specific date.

Once trade secret or know-how is leaked to the outside, it loses its value. In case of patent-protected technology, patent holders can remove violative products from the marketplace by enforcing patent right. Actually, according to the Japanese government data, IP holders could successfully suspend imports of 30,627 cases in which 92.2% of them came from China in 2017.

I have no idea how the leakage of confidential information on the Baidu document-sharing site impacted the victim companies. Certainly, there are doubtlessly circumstances when it makes sense to protect it as trade secret. However, we should fully recognize the risk of the leakage of trade secret. It is important to make employees aware of the seriousness of information leakage through signing a confidentiality agreement or providing confidential information trainings. Before that, it is more important to avoid disclosing confidential information beyond necessity even within a company.