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Trade Secrets

Two office towers facing each other, with two opposing crossing arrows each carrying a padlocked confidential-file icon and a silhouette of a person with a briefcase between them, symbolising Apple and OpenAI's mutual trade-secret accusations and confidential material moving both ways with talent

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OpenAI Turns the Tables on Apple: 100+ Unreleased-Device Files and a "Mirror-Image" Trade-Secret Fight

The trade-secret fight between Apple and OpenAI just gained another twist. On 14 October, in a new filing in the Northern District of California (San Jose), OpenAI alleged that a former employee who left OpenAI for Apple had, on their last day, sent more than 100 confidential files relating to at least one unreleased device to personal accounts, and later presented the material to senior Apple executives.## A "mirror-image" caseThe twist is that Apple sued first.
A half-open drawer holding coloured blocks beside a brass key, for China's source code trade secret ruling

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China: Code Access No Defence in Trade Secret Case

The Intellectual Property Court of China's Supreme People's Court published a case summary on 5 November in case (2023) Zui Gao Fa Zhi Min Zhong No. 539. Its core point: a defendant who was entitled to access a technical secret is not thereby entitled to the way it obtained the secret or to what it did with it afterwards. The test is whether its intent, its means of obtaining the secret and its later conduct caused, or could cause, the owner to lose effective control of the secret.