Technology protection: patents, secrets and code

A technology is never one legal object. Inside one product sit written code, a technical solution, a gathered data set and a method nobody outside the team has seen, and each of those is held by a different mechanism with its own conditions.

The first decision is the one that cannot be taken back: what goes into an application and what stays closed. An application buys a right that others can be stopped with, and pays for it with publication. Secrecy asks for no filing and no fee, and ends the day it leaks.

Where the value sits

• The repositories, and which parts of them were written here and which arrived from elsewhere.
• The technical solution: what it does that nothing published before it does.
• The data the product runs on: where each part came from and on what terms.
• The methods nobody has published: who holds them and who can reach them.
• Every disclosure already made: talks, papers, public repositories, investor decks and supplier discussions, with dates.

What we will need

• Contracts with everyone who built it
• The list of what the product is made of
• Any applications already filed
• The record of what has been shown in public

If a document does not exist, we will name whatever sits in its place. Working out who holds the rights across the whole company is a full rights audit; fixing the date on a version is deposit and escrow; a copy already on sale is protection from clones.

Four routes, one technology

A patent

It gives you a right others can be stopped with, and it asks for the invention in writing, clear enough for a skilled reader to build it. New, inventive and usable in industry are the conditions it is measured against.

A closely held method

Nothing is filed and nothing expires, for as long as the information is secret, has commercial value because it is secret, and is kept that way by reasonable measures. A leak ends it, and so does a rival who gets there alone.

The written code

Code is held as it was written, from the moment it exists, with no application needed for it to arise. It reaches the way the thing was written and leaves what it does open.

The data set

A collection becomes an object of its own when the choosing or the arranging of its contents is itself a creation. That protection stops at the arrangement and reaches neither the material inside nor anyone else’s rights in it.

Sources: the twenty-year minimum from the filing date, the three conditions for undisclosed information and the rules on code and data compilations are set by the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. It binds its member states and works through the law each of them enacts. Eighteen-month publication and the thirty-month deadline: the organization running that route.