Trade Secrets and NDAs in Türkiye: Protection Without Registration

Not everything valuable can be registered. Customer lists, supplier terms, pricing models, manufacturing processes, recipes and unpublished R&D never appear on any register. Their protection rests on two things: keeping them genuinely secret, and a contractual framework that supports that.

How Turkish law protects secrets

There is no single trade secrets statute. Protection is drawn from unfair competition provisions of the Commercial Code, the employee’s duty of loyalty under the Code of Obligations, and criminal provisions on disclosing commercial secrets. The practical consequence is that protection is not automatic: information must be secret, subject to reasonable measures to keep it secret, and commercially valuable because it is secret. A customer list sitting in an open shared folder will not be treated as a secret.

What an NDA needs

• A concrete definition of confidential information — "everything is confidential" is unenforceable in practice.
• Carve-outs for public information, information already known, and legally required disclosure.
• A use restriction as well as a secrecy obligation.
• A duration that matches the nature of the information.
• Rules on sharing with employees and subcontractors.
• Return and destruction obligations, including digital copies.
• A liquidated damages clause — the most effective answer to the difficulty of proving loss.
• Jurisdiction, governing law and access to interim relief.

Contracts are not enough

Access controls, document classification, logging, device policies and joiner-leaver procedures do more than reduce leaks: they are how you prove, later, that the information was actually managed as a secret.

Secret or patent?

A patent trades disclosure for protection; a secret protects only while secrecy holds. Where an innovation can be reverse-engineered from the product, secrecy is fragile. Where it stays on your servers or production line, it can be the more durable choice.

See our article on patent filing, or contact us about your confidentiality framework.

General information only, not legal advice.