[1](p2) To date, 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the UTSA, with New York as the remaining exceptions.
[2] A prefatory note to the UTSA states some original motivations for the act: A valid patent provides a legal monopoly for seventeen years in exchange for public disclosure of an invention.
In view of the substantial number of patents that the courts invalidate, many businesses now elect to protect commercially valuable information by relying on the state trade secret protection law.The UTSA made note of the commercial value and competitive advantages inherent in trade secrets.
[3] In addition to providing some recourse for any uncertainty associated with a patent, the UTSA also serves to codify the common law remedies that have emerged in many states.
Sections 2–4 provided remedies for potential wrongs committed in violation of the act, including injunctive relief, damages and attorney's fees.
The UTSA also provided refinement through comments to the definition of a trade secret itself: Regarding reasonable efforts to maintain secrecy, the UTSA maintained that actions such as restricting access to a "need-to-know basis" and informing employees that the information is secret met the criteria for reasonable efforts.
[3] The UTSA provided for several potential remedies for wrongs committed under the act, including injunctive relief, damages, and attorney's fees.
The UTSA, in the comments for section 2, referenced a court case in which a misappropriated trade secret was used to build military technology for use during the Vietnam War.
[3] Section 4 of the UTSA stipulated that the court may award attorney's fees to the prevailing party for actions made in "bad faith or willful and malicious misappropriation".
[3] As of June 2019[update], the UTSA has been adopted by all states except New York and North Carolina (but its law is very similar and seems to borrow heavily from the act [1]).