In an unexpected but significant development, Silicon Valley Congressman Zoe Lofgren has introduced a bill that would add a civil cause of action to the Economic Espionage Act (EEA).  At the present time, the EEA only authorizes the federal government to pursue civil and criminal actions.  Last week, Congresswoman Lofgren introduced H.R. 2466, which is titled the “Private Right of Action Against Theft of Trade Secrets Act of 2013” (“PRATSA”) and it is a welcome effort to provide a federal civil remedy to companies that have had their trade secrets stolen.  (A hat tip to Robert Milligan and Daniel Joshua Salinas for their excellent post on this amendment).

PRATSA is remarkably simple. First, it only seeks to add a civil remedy for violations of 18 U.S.C. §1832(a) which presently permits criminal prosecutions for trade secrets “related to a product or service used in or intended for use in interstate or foreign commerce.”  Second, it explicitly exempts efforts to lawfully reverse engineer a trade secret, addressing a potential ambiguity that existed previously under the EEA.

In this respect, Congresswoman Lofgren’s bill stands in contrast to previous efforts to add a civil cause of action to EEA that sought to add a number of provisions that may have, in retrospect, unduly complicated their passage.  In 2011 and again in 2012, Senators Chris Coons and Herb Kohl introduced the Protecting American Trade Secrets and Innovation Act (PATSIA) that was directed primarily at international trade secret misappropriation.  PATSIA proposed, among other things, an ex parte seizure order that would have allowed a claimant to seize misappropriated product or preserve evidence, as well as heightened pleading requirements.  Both of those efforts to enact PATSIA ultimately languished in committee.

The amendment is a shrewd one because it complements another amendment that Congresswoman Lofgren recently introduced with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) to narrow the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).  That proposal, which has been named Aaron’s Law, seeks to remedy perceived abuses of the CFAA, the complaints over which reached a crescendo earlier this year when Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide during the course of his prosecution under the CFAA.  (For more on the Swartz prosecution, see my post earlier this year here). 

Among other things, Congresswoman Lofgren’s amendment to the CFAA would effectively prohibit employers from using the CFAA for trade secret misappropriation claims.  A number of courts, including the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuits have allowed employers to use the CFAA to ensnare former employees who violated computer use policies when they improperly accessed and then took trade secrets from their computers with them to their new employer.

In other words, Congresswoman Lofgren has dangled the carrot of a possible trade secret civil remedy in exchange for the stick of narrowing the CFAA to eliminate its use as a trade secret statute.  I suspect that her proposal will be particularly popular in her home state of California, since it provides those employers with a federal trade secret remedy that has been lacking since the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the CFAA should not be applied to violations of computer use policies.

All in all, a very positive development.  The simplicity of the amendment, coupled with the recent recognition that trade secret theft has become a matter of national security, will hopefully ensure its passage into law.