NEWSLETTER-2020-metin

387 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW to, persons within the circles that normally deal with the kind of information in question; • The information that has commercial value because it is sec- ret; and • The information that has been subject to reasonable steps under the circumstances, by the person lawfully in control of the information, to keep it secret. The 23th Civil Chamber of the Court of Cassation defined a trade secret in its decision numbered 2016/6958 E., 2019/4349 K. and dated 21.10.2019 as follows: “ A trade secret is defined as the information, which provides economic benefits to real persons or legal entity mer- chants against its competitors, kept as a secret, and necessary mea- sures are taken to keep it secret. Trade secrets may also be defined by considering the unfair competition principles as ‘all information, such as formula, layout, and model, etc. that is used by the merchant for its commercial activities and provides advantages against the competi- tors, who do not have that information. ’” The criteria sought for commercial information to be deemed as a trade secret are, (i) not to be generally known or readily accessible by the public or relevant business circles, (ii) having a commercial value due to being secret; and (iii) reasonable steps should have been taken to keep it secret. Accordingly, although the commercial informa- tion of a company is not known by any other person, and its secrecy has commercial value, if no reasonable steps are taken to preserve the secrecy of this information, it will not be considered a trade secret. A good example for taking reasonable steps to protect the trade secrets is the Coca-Cola case. According to an affidavit given by a senior vice-president and general counsel for Coca-Cola in a court case, the written version of the secret formula of Coca-Cola is kept in a security vault at the Trust Company Bank in Atlanta, and the vault can only be opened by a resolution from the Company’s Board of Directors, and only two persons in the company shall know the formula at any one time, and that only those persons may oversee the actual preparation of the formula 1 . 1 World Intellectual Property Organization, Module 4, Trade Secrets, p. 6, https://