Breach of Confidentiality Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Breach of Confidentiality - Essay Example It is intended to make sure that a person in possession of confidential information only uses it for purposes for which it was transmitted to him in the first place. The law of confidence can - as opposed to copyright, which is only concerned with the protection of the form in which information, idea or thought is expressed - protect the content of the information, idea or thought. The main function of the law of confidentiality, or an action for breach of confidence, is the prevention of the illegitimate use of confidential information by a recipient of information. A good conceptual springboard to the understanding of the justification for the protection extended to those items which fall within the ambit of confidence, is the notion that something which people are prepared to pay for must be worth protecting and therefore ought to be protected. However, the courts will only enforce properly identified rights that fall within recognised categories known to law. Some of the items that are protected under the law of confidence are those which do not consist of any specific intellectual property rights under patent, design and copyright or even trade marks law. Traditionally, this has been classified into personal information, governmental secrets and trade secrets. (Catherine Colston and Kirsty Middleton Modern Intellectual Proprty Law 2nd Edition) Obviously, the information, in order to receive the protection of the law, must be confidential. To be such, it must not be something which is public property or knowledge. Therefore, information which is in the public domain cannot be confidential. However confidential the circumstances of communication, there can be no breach of confidence in revealing to others something which is already common knowledge. For example, an employer cannot restrain his ex-employee from revealing a secret process to his new employer if that secret process has already been patented by the employer prior to the revelation by the ex-employee, for it is by then already in the public domain (Mustad v Dosen [1963] RPC 41). All that is required, however, is relative, and not absolute (as in the case of a patent specification, where novelty is required) secrecy. The information must be information the release of which the owner believes would be injurious to him or of advantage to his rivals and others. The owner must believe the information is confidential or secret, i.e. not already in the public domain. The owner's believe must be reasonable. The information must be judged in the light of the usage and practices of the particular industry concerned. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the mere fact of the publication of information does not detract