4.7: Legal Considerations

Patents

Technology companies place a premium on innovation and one of the ways that innovations are codified with special legal status is with patents.

Technology companies usually offer patent bonuses to innovative engineers associated with their work on a product that is being developed and brought to market. Many engineers think that their work is innovative and they may be motivated by the patent bonuses or by their professional desire to have patents on their resumes.

Companies typically have a budget for patent work for each calendar year. Filing for patents is subject to the oversight of an executive panel (patent review board) and budget constraints. Thus, even though many ideas may be worthy of being patented, that may not be possible due to budgetary considerations.

Trade Secrets

When some ideas are not patented, there is some protection provided by protecting the intellectual property through the use of trade secrets.

Additionally, some material may be fundamentally so important to a company that it does not want to make disclosures through the patent process and wanhts to use the trade secret mechanism instead.

Trademarks

Early in the product development cycle, it is important to perform a trademark search for the planned potential trademarks, such as the product name or product family name. One of the reasons for this is that the software for the product may need to make checks for the product platform on which it is running and do different things based on which platform it is. The product name or family is often printed on the product itself and appears in product collateral such as data sheets, white papers, etc.

If the trademark search is not performed, or the results of it are ignored or the company decides to take a risk, the downstream results can be very undesirable. For example, after the product ships into the market, receiving a cease and desist request from another company's legal department for trademark infringement can have very negative consequences.