COSTA RICA Law and Practice Contributed by: Maricruz Villanea Villegas, Roberto Arguello, Edna Lopez and Leyla Harper-Dominique, IDEAS IP
Contract Protection Contract is the most reliable tool for controlling data- base use in Costa Rica. Scraping and Data Extraction Costa Rica has no specific law addressing web scrap- ing or automated data extraction. 7.2 AI-Generated Works and Inventorship/ Authorship AI-Generated Outputs and Copyright Costa Rica has no legislation addressing AI-generated works. 7.3 Training Data, Model Development and Infringement Risk No response has been provided in this jurisdiction. 7.4 Enforcement Against AI-Enabled Infringement No response has been provided in this jurisdiction. 8. Intersections and Overlaps 8.1 Choice of Protection and Strategic Considerations Copyright arises automatically and is the default for original creative output. Trade marks protect signs identifying commercial origin with indefinite renew- able protection. Industrial designs protect aesthetic product appearance for ten years. Patents protect functional inventions with 20 years’ exclusivity. Trade secrets protect valuable confidential technical or com- mercial information with no fixed term. The key factors in choosing between patent and trade secret are: • reverse-engineering risk – if competitors can discover the method by examining the product, a patent is more reliable; • patentability – if the invention lacks novelty or inventive step, trade secret is the only option; • duration – trade secrets can last indefinitely, where- as patents expire after 20 years and place the invention in the public domain;
• prosecution burden – trade secrets require no reg- istration, fees or prosecution delay; and • mandatory exploitation – patents require working the invention within three or four years of grant/ filing or face compulsory licensing, whereas trade secrets impose no such obligation. In practice, manufacturing processes and formula- tions in Costa Rica are more commonly protected as trade secrets, while patents are preferred where the product itself reveals the invention. 8.2 Cumulative and Overlapping Protection Cumulative protection is generally permitted. The Patents Law expressly states that industrial design protection does not exclude copyright or other legal rights; the Trademark Law and copyright law operate independently. Narrow statutory limits prevent using registration to crowd out legitimate rights: a trade mark cannot be registered if it would infringe a third party’s copyright (Trademark Law, Article 8 (j)), and purely functional features are excluded from both industrial design and trade mark registration. No statutory rule governs how courts resolve conflicts when multiple IP rights are asserted over the same feature – that remains a practi- cal gap in the local framework. 8.3 Patents and Trade Secrets Know-how and technical information can be protected as a trade secret under Law No 7975 independently and concurrently with any stage of a patent process. Once a patent is published, the disclosed information enters the public domain and loses trade secret pro- tection. Trade secret protection cannot survive patent expiry or invalidation for any information disclosed in the patent. One narrow exception applies: if confidential infor- mation was disclosed without authorisation (by an employee, licensee or breach of contract), the legiti- mate owner may use the patent grace period (Article 2.3, Law No 6867) to file a patent application within the applicable window without loss of novelty. The grace period preserves the patent filing right; it does not revive trade secret protection in the disclosed information.
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