In November 2013, the European Commission published a proposal for a directive on the protection of undisclosed know-how and business information (trade secrets). A second version of this proposal, already amended by the Council in May 2014, gained the approval of the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament at the end of June 2015, thus officially entering the legislative phase. The Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies (CEIPI), a university institute dedicated to teaching and research on intellectual property, is strongly interested in the issues raised by this proposal. For this reason, the Centre intends to propose a certain number of observations aimed to the European Union’s legislator.