Obernolte introduces bill to protect American companies from IP theft and secure U.S. trade secrets

U.S. Congressman Jay Obernolte (CA-08) introduced H.R. 4327, the Protect American Trade Secrets Act, on Friday to help companies protect their trade secrets from theft overseas. The bill will ensure companies can sue individuals and organizations found to be stealing U.S. trade secrets, such as intellectual property (IP) theft, regardless of where they reside or may have fled to.

“As the United States takes steps to strengthen our computer science workforce and bolster our research and development, we must also work to ensure that our technological developments are secured from the threat of China and other nations that actively seek to steal our technology and trade secrets,” said Rep. Obernolte. “Legislation I introduced to support our STEM workforce and expand next-generation computing passed the U.S. House of Representatives just last week. This bill protects those developments by ensuring our companies have the ability to fight back against intellectual property theft.”

In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has undertaken a strategic project of massive intellectual property theft and industrial espionage to surpass the United States technologically and economically. As recently as 2019, one in five North American-based corporations said that Chinese firms had stolen their intellectual property within the last year. The cost to U.S. companies is estimated at up to $600 billion annually.

H.R. 4327, the Protect American Trade Secrets Act, protects U.S. companies’ ability to sue foreign actors who steal trade secrets and intellectual property by making a key modification to the 2016 Defend Trade Secrets Act to ensure the law applies extraterritorially. This will ensure that U.S. courts maintain jurisdiction for private rights of action against the theft of trade secrets, including intellectual property, when the perpetrators reside in or flee to other countries.

Read the bill text here.