The dissertation is comprehensive research on the legal status of know-how. The analysis of the legal nature of such a specific object as know-how was carried out on the basis of the applicable legislation of Ukraine, international experience, judicial practice, and national and foreign legal doctrine, which allowed building the author's approach to determining the legal status of know-how, as well as to exercising, protecting and defending the rights to it.
The aim and objectives of the dissertation determined the choice of its structure. The work consists of three sections dealing with issues such as clarifying the nature, features of know-how, its place among civil right objects (in particular, among objects of intellectual property rights and information), the mechanism of the primary emergence of the right to know-how and the acquisition of the right to know-how, the content of these rights, the peculiarities of the list of persons who are the authors of the know-how, are entitled to manage the right to know-how and may enter into legal relations concerning the know-how, the exercise of the right to know-how, including ways to use know-how and the definition of contractual forms of managing property rights to know-how, and features of the protection and defense of the right to this object.
The research identified know-how as a result of intellectual, creative activity and at the same time a way of protecting it, which has economic value, practical suitability, is characterized by limited access, lack of general awareness about it, and is an original result embodied in an objectively expressed form, separate from the author’s personality and for which appropriate steps have been taken to keep such information confidential. Know-how is an object of intellectual property rights and confidential information in the field of intellectual property. It is corroborated that know-how is not only an object of intellectual property rights, but also a way of protecting the results of intellectual, creative activity. The features (criteria) of know-how are limited access to the result of intellectual, creative activity, lack of general awareness of this result, its economic value, practical suitability, originality and properly maintained confidentiality. These attributes are qualitative characteristics of know-how, whose value is ensured first and foremost by properly observed confidentiality. The object of know-how may be a device, substance, process, new application of already known results of intellectual, creative activity – the main thing is that the object of the result of intellectual, creative activity should conform to the features of know-how.
