The Binjiang District Procuratorate recently issued the "Guidelines for Examination on Criminal Cases of Trade Secrets Infringement" (hereinafter referred to as "Guidelines"), as the first provincial guidelines of its kind, which consists of 11 Chapters and 49 Articles, and comprehensively and systematically stipulates the idea of "step-by-step examination" on criminal cases involving infringement of trade secrets. 

The Guidelines stipulate, on the one hand, that the obligee shall clarify the claimed secret content and define trade secret from three aspects: secrecy (whether it is not known to the public through identification), value and confidentiality measures, and make clear, on the other hand, the identification on the infringement act, namely, the examination of "contact + similar situation" (which usually denotes determination of uniformity through identification). The Guidelines also regulate examination on argument for non-infringement, and further gauge the degree of the infringement. In short, before determining the infringement and its severity, the oblige shall first confirm whether the object of the tort belongs to trade secret. In the process of "step-by-step examination", the emphasis is placed on the examination of the evidence of the obligee, which is carried out in strict accordance with the steps to form a chain of evidence for accusing crimes.

The Guidelines clearly stipulate the contribution degree of secrecy in calculating major losses, the determination of joint crimes and unit crimes, the problems that should be paid attention to in the case of intersection between criminal and civil, and the prevention of "secondary leakage of secret" in the examination, so as to improve the efficiency and quality of the examination on criminal infringement of trade secrets.