premise: All confidential information made available by one party to the other shall be kept secret from third parties. 3.2  No confidential information received may be supplied to a third party without the prior written permission of the other party hereto. 3.3  Beyond this, each party also undertakes as follows: 3.3.1 not to use the confidential information of the other party for any purposes other than the purpose contemplated by this agreement; 3.3.2 not to modify or reconstruct, cause others to reconstruct or use for any purposes other than the purpose contemplated by this agreement, any object made available to it by the other party. 4. Exceptions 4.1  The obligation to observe secrecy under this Agreement shall not apply to: 4.1.1 information, documents (including information and documents in machine-readable form), software, objects and other materials that is generally available to the public, or become generally available to the public other than as a breach of this Non-disclosure Agreement; 4.1.2 information that is already lawfully in the possession of one of the parties hereto prior to the effective date of this Non-disclosure Agreement, without having been obtained from the other party or one of its affiliated companies; 4.1.3 information that is received by one of the parties hereto from a third party after the effective date of this Non-disclosure Agreement, provided this third party has not violated any Non-disclosure Agreement; 4.1.4 information the publication of which is required by statute and/or common law; 4.1.5 information that the receiving party, as evidenced by written records, has independently acquired or developed; Nevertheless, each party shall keep the use of the information by the other party secret from third parties. 5. Disclosure to Employees and Affiliated Companies 5.1 Each party shall make available confidential information to its employees only in so far as the employees need it to fulfil the purpose as set out in 1. above.  It will ensure that these employees are equally obliged to observe secrecy, whereby the obligation shall survive the termination of their respective employment contracts. 5.2  Disclosure of confidential information to affiliated companies is permitted under the conditions laid out in 5.1 above.