§ 351.105 - Public, business proprietary, privileged, and classified information.  


Latest version.
  • § 351.105 Public, business proprietary, privileged, and classified information.

    (a) Introduction. There are four categories of information in an antidumping or countervailing duty proceeding: public, business proprietary, privileged, and classified. In general, public information is information that may be made available to the public, whereas business proprietary information may be disclosed (if at all) only to authorized applicants under an APO. Privileged and classified information may not be disclosed at all, even under an APO. This section describes the four categories of information.

    (b) Public information. The Secretary normally will consider the following to be public information:

    (1) Factual information of a type that has been published or otherwise made available to the public by the person submitting it;

    (2) Factual information that is not designated as business proprietary by the person submitting it;

    (3) Factual information that, although designated as business proprietary by the person submitting it, is in a form that cannot be associated with or otherwise used to identify activities of a particular person or that the Secretary determines is not properly designated as business proprietary;

    (4) Publicly available laws, regulations, decrees, orders, and other official documents of a country, including English translations; and

    (5) Written argument relating to the proceeding that is not designated as business proprietary.

    (c) Business proprietary information. The Secretary normally will consider the following factual information to be business proprietary information, if so designated by the submitter:

    (1) Business or trade secrets concerning the nature of a product or production process;

    (2) Production costs (but not the identity of the production components unless a particular component is a trade secret);

    (3) Distribution costs (but not channels of distribution);

    (4) Terms of sale (but not terms of sale offered to the public);

    (5) Prices of individual sales, likely sales, or other offers (but not components of prices, such as transportation, if based on published schedules, dates of sale, product descriptions (other than business or trade secrets described in paragraph (c)(1) of this section), or order numbers);

    (6) Names of particular customers, distributors, or suppliers (but not destination of sale or designation of type of customer, distributor, or supplier, unless the destination or designation would reveal the name);

    (7) In an antidumping proceeding, the exact amount of the dumping margin on individual sales;

    (8) In a countervailing duty proceeding, the exact amount of the benefit applied for or received by a person from each of the programs under investigation or review (but not descriptions of the operations of the programs, or the amount if included in official public statements or documents or publications, or the ad valorem countervailable subsidy rate calculated for each person under a program);

    (9) The names of particular persons from whom business proprietary information was obtained;

    (10) The position of a domestic producer or workers regarding a petition; and

    (11) Any other specific business information the release of which to the public would cause substantial harm to the competitive position of the submitter.

    (d) Privileged information. The Secretary will consider information privileged if, based on principles of law concerning privileged information, the Secretary decides that the information should not be released to the public or to parties to the proceeding. Privileged information is exempt from disclosure to the public or to representatives of interested parties.

    (e) Classified information. Classified information is information that is classified under Executive Order No. 12356 of April 2, 1982 (47 FR 14874 and 15557, 3 CFR 1982 Comp. p. 166) or successor executive order, if applicable. Classified information is exempt from disclosure to the public or to representatives of interested parties.